First, there is the screen itself. It is not paper-white at all. The contrast is rather poor, and text is not as sharp-edged as I’d like. Not having a backlight, while saving battery consumption, does mean it’s necessary to have a light source handy to read productively. My caveats don’t extend to the point of complete disgruntlement, though. While the screen on my iPhone is backlit and high contrast/resolution, its smaller size makes it much more difficult to read for more than a few minutes. Since one reason I want an eReader is for grad school textbooks, that makes a difference. However, although I can list a number of caveats, my reaction was not nearly as negative as that described by Nicholson Baker in his The New Yorker review. However, even Baker says in his final paragraphs that once he started reading, “Poof, the Kindle disappeared, just as Jeff Bezos promised it would.” However, one feature that leaves me completely unimpressed is the built-in Web browser. I’m not sure if it’s Sprint’s 3G network or the browser software or the Kindle’s hardware, but for some reason opening a page on the Kindle is excruciatingly slow, and unless the page has a very clean design and a well-functioning style sheet, the results can be unreadable. I find that even though Web links normally provide very useful extensions to many documents, on the Kindle they are just too much trouble to be worth the time and effort required to use them.

Kindle for School

Last term I bought several textbooks in ebook editions, and found it quite a hard slog to get through them on the iPhone. For the Fall semester I’ve already purchased a couple of required texts in Kindle format, and I’m much more confident that I will be able to read them more productively than I could on the iPhone. For one thing, the Kindle for iPhone app doesn’t have a way to highlight or mark text selections, a time-honored study technique used by students for countless years. The Kindle DX does allow highlighting, and automatically adds marked selections to a file called “My Clippings.txt”, which can be downloaded to a computer using the USB cable. As a plain text file, these notes can then be organized in any way one chooses. On the Kindle itself “highlighting” consists of a light grey underlining that is not very conspicuous, but not invisible either.

Kindle Resources

Speaking of Kindle for iPhone, since Amazon’s acquisition of the company who make the highly-regarded Stanza ebook reader software, the latest version of this app shows many improvements obviously imported from that excellent application. Stanza itself comes in a desktop version as well as for iPhone OS, which has a feature I just found out about. Possibly new since the Amazon acquisition, it is now possible to save books readable by Stanza Desktop in Kindle’s .azw format. In particular, I’ve found that .epub format ebooks, available from many publishers including O’Reilly and Associates, Baen Books, and the public domain resource, Project Gutenberg, are very easy to use on the Kindle. Just open them in Stanza Desktop, select File-Export Book As-Amazon Kindle and copy the resulting file into the Kindle’s “document” folder when it is connected to the computer with its USB cable. Or, email it to the Kindle using your personal [yourname]@kindle.com address. Before sending documents to the Kindle via email, though, you have to register the email address you want to send it from in your Amazon “Manage my Kindle” account. Using this address costs US$0.10 per document, but will send it directly to the device over the Whispernet Sprint cellular network. There is also a free email address, [yourname]@free.kindle.com, but there is not much point in using that for this purpose since you have to then copy the document from your computer to the Kindle, and if you already have it on your computer in the appropriate format, why send it through Amazon’s system?

The Whispernet cellular network does add a special filip to the Kindle. Buying books on the Kindle and having them delivered directly to it within minutes is possibly the most compelling reason to buy this eReader instead of others on the market at this moment. Amazon’s Kindle Store has an enormous selection of books, magazines, newspapers and blogs available, of course, and the hardest thing about it is to avoid blowing the budget filling up the Kindle with the enticing commercial offerings. But finding a lot of sources of free ebooks has saved my finances. One list of sites offering free ebooks is in The Kindle 2 Cookbook: How To Do Everything the Manual Doesn’t Tell You, which has a lot of other very useful information, too.

This ought to give you a taste of why I’m happy with my new Kindle DX. Will I still be as thrilled with it if Apple announces a competing product next month? Maybe not, but in the meantime I gotta go now… so much to read, so little time!

But in spite of all these factors, I’ve still bought one. Why?

The fact is, I’m impatient. I’ve long seen the benefits of digital media. Indeed, I’ve even published books electronically myself. A decade ago, I owned a PalmOS device (a Handspring) on which I read a number of ebooks as well as kept track of appointments, played games, and so on. That device finally failed, and I didn’t replace it, so all the content I’d bought for it, while still in my computer’s archive folder, is essentially lost. Still, I did enjoy the handheld experience, and know I’ll use any ebook reader I finally acquire. There’s the practical issue of portability, too. My husband and I live in our motorhome nearly half the year, and there is just not enough room to carry all the books I’d like to have available in there.

But what about that iPhone I’ve written about so often? I’ve even written about the Kindle for iPhone app on this blog and I use it still. But as much as I love my iPhone, it is the case that my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be (which never was that great), and these days I simply cannot read for long or as well on even as good a screen as the iPhone’s simply because of its small size. I find that although I have read entire books on it, I don’t retain as much sense from them as I want to. Also, the iPhone app doesn’t let me highlight blocks of text to refer to later. Yes, I can create bookmarks, but that’s not quite the same. Since I have bought some of my textbooks for grad school as ebooks, these are critical shortcomings.

In short, the Kindle for iPhone app is a stopgap. I had hoped Apple would announce a tablet computer or ebook reader this summer, and if they had I would have held off a while longer, but they haven’t. Oh, if they do eventually come out with a new gadget, especially if they make a deal with Amazon to allow Kindle-formatted ebooks to work on it, I will cheerfully throw my Kindle up on eBay and jump on the killer iBook. But until that day, Amazon is getting my somewhat grudging allegiance and money.

I haven’t been keeping up with what other users are seeing (on Twitter, of course) because I was doing school work like a good girl, but now I think it’s time to check it out. I have even followed @ATTNews, all to no avail. One article I read (but have since misplaced) said they got a message in iTunes saying activation could take as long as 48 hours, but I got no such message, probably because my account is already active. I’m sorely tempted to try switching the SIM cards, but might hold off a little longer.

In the meanwhile, I have been having fun playing with all the apps that don’t require the phone service. Since I have WiFi here, that’s just about everything except the actual phone. This puppy is fast! How fast, you ask? Have a look:

The way a BBS worked was that a geek somewhere would install special software and at least one modem that allowed incoming calls to connect to his computer (it was almost always a guy), where the visitor could see the “board” and post his or her own messages in a thread, or start a new topic. These systems were text-based, mostly due to bandwidth limitations, but also because most personal computers in those days were not capable of displaying much if anything in the way of graphics beyond ASCII art.

So why am I dredging up these ancient memories? It’s because this week I started an online Master’s program, and the software used for that, called Blackboard, reminds me sooooooooo much of the old BBS!

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not disparaging the use of this technology. It seems to work pretty well, and of course it is not anywhere near as primitive as my comparison implies. With the new software it is possible to embed videos and other multimedia (do people talk about “multimedia” anymore?), and of course we can include links to other sites in our posts since the Web has been invented, which adds another whole dimension to what was possible back in the day. But the general structure, with hierarchically organized message threads and primarily text communications, is very dejá vu-inducing.

So, I’m feeling right at home. And I don’t miss the static-y whine of the carrier tone at all.

College study is essentially an exercise in knowledge management, and one of the tools of the KM trade is the ubiquitous database. Now it just so happens that in the past few weeks one of the companies who make a DB system I’ve used for over a decade, FileMaker Pro, have released an iPhone app that syncs with their consumer-grade product, Bento. I’ll be honest and say that when I’d tried out the 1.0 version of Bento about a year ago I was unimpressed. I saw no reason to buy it since I already had FMPro (albeit an obsolete version), and could use it for whatever I wanted to do, thank you very much. But ah! To sync with my iPhone! That’s a different story!

So, first I bought the iPhone app (for $4.99, a real steal for a DBMS), and it was pretty cool, but I quickly bumped up against the limitations of a handheld device’s small screen and limited input capabilities. Then, remembering my earlier lack of enthusiasm for Bento 1.0, I thought I’d see if it was feasible to design and export my databases in FileMaker Pro. It is, sort of, but looks pretty cumbersome, and besides that, the version that I have (6.0) is so old it’s not even eligible for an upgrade, and lacks the tools required to export in the required format easily. I’d have to buy the latest version for either $299 or $499, depending on which flavor I chose. Bento 2.0, at $49, began to look a lot more attractive.

You guessed it. I caved. And I’m not sorry. Here’s one result:

 

Bento is pretty! The folks at FileMaker have put considerable effort into making form design painless. So, while this system lacks many of the more powerful bells-and-whistles of the pro software, including the ability to publish standalone versions of databases one builds with it, for personal use or within a small enterprise (where everyone can have a licensed copy of the enabling software) it is very impressive. And putting together good-looking and useful database apps quickly, then syncing them to my iPhone to carry with me wherever I go is fast, too. In just one day I’ve built and started using four databases that will help me stay on top of things in grad school, and I’ll be making more for other purposes as well, you can be sure.

If you look closely in the left column of the screenshot of my “Writing Assignments” database, you’ll see icons for several others, including “Classes”, “Reading Assignments”, and “Discussion Board Topics”. In addition to having the shells of these apps, thanks to instructor soon-to-be-Dr. Jeremy Littau’s superbly organized and early-delivered syllabus, I’ve already entered 27 reading assignments, 12 writing assignments and 26 discussion topic records in their respective “boxes” (/bento/ is Japanese for /box/), and within the same 24 hours have finished some of the readings and made notes about them in the appropriate records’ fields. I’m feeling much more confident now that I’ll be able to keep up with what I assume will be classrooms full of people a generation or two younger than me. Wish me luck!