Hands On with Amazon’s Kindle App

In my previous article, I wrote about my feeling that Amazon’s release of its Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod touch is a revolutionary event. Over the past couple of days, I’ve been trying out the app on my iPod touch. Here are my thoughts.

First, Amazon has made it very easy to buy books, though you can’t do so from the Kindle application itself. (My guess is that it would have been much more complex to include the necessary security and authentication code.) You buy a book from the Amazon web site using Safari – either on your mobile device or your computer – and you choose which device, if you have more than one, the book should be sent to. Then you open the Kindle app on your mobile device, tap the synchronization button, and your book(s) download. Books come in pretty quickly: Amazon says you’ll have them in sixty seconds or less, which is the case for all but the largest books (and they even include a disclaimer on pages for such books). After you get your books, you view them in a list, and tap one to open it.

To read a book, you have a choice of five font sizes, from tiny to very large; the largest size displays only about 20-25 characters per line, which makes reading a bit difficult; if you really need large type, you’ll find the size appropriate, but not, perhaps, the screen size. I’ve chosen the middle size, which displays about six words per line. Any smaller and my aging eyes strain. I’ve also found that it’s better to turn the brightness down quite low, at least if you’re not reading in daylight; reading in bed last night, I turned it down near the lowest setting.

There are a couple of navigation features: you can tap a “book” icon and choose to view a book’s cover, its table of contents, or its beginning, or choose to go to a specific “location”; that’s Amazon’s term for places in a book. It’s hard to know where you want to go, as locations seem to increment every couple hundred characters. (As an example, the first book I’m reading is about 500 pages in mass-market paperback, and has 10,000 locations.) But in the table of contents, the chapter names or numbers are “hot” links that take you to those spots. It should be noted than when you stop reading, even if you switch applications, the Kindle remembers where you left off, so you don’t have to find that spot yourself.

In order to try out the Kindle app, I felt it would be best to start with a “page-turner”. I’m a fan of mysteries and thrillers, so I chose a book by an author I hadn’t read before: Vince Flynn’s Term Limits, a “political thriller”. I quickly found that I was turning, or swiping the pages, quite fast. It’s easy to read this kind of book, and I quickly forgot that I was reading on an iPod touch. Once you start reading, the only thing you do, in fact, is swipe pages. Swipe to the left to go ahead a page, and swipe to the right to go back. I found that, after a few minutes, I could do a one-hand swipe: hold the iPod, say, in my right hand, and swipe with my thumb. You only need to swipe a little bit to get a page to “turn”, so it’s really quite easy to do, even if you read quickly. (As I was after a while.)

The iPod touch being small, I found it easier to read sitting in an easy chair with a cushion on my lap and my hands on the cushion. In bed, I put a pillow on my chest, which I usually do when reading, and held my hands – or hand, since, unlike a book, I can hold and operate the iPod touch with one hand – on the pillow.

All in all, I’m quite satisfied with this reading experience. I’m not sure that I’d feel the same about reading a “literary” novel or a non-fiction book in this manner. For now, I felt it would be best to start with a “literary bon-bon”, or a throw-away book, the kind I wouldn’t care about keeping after I finished it. After all, that’s one of the drawbacks: when you’re finished, you still have the book’s file, but not a “book”, with pages between covers.

One note: the book I purchased was the same price for the Kindle edition as it is in mass-market paperback ($7.99). For new books, the standard price of $9.99 is generally more than 50% less than the hardcover price. I think they should lower the prices of books available in paperback; if so, they’ll probably get more takers for those books.

Get books for your Kindle app from Amazon.com