The only e-book readers I’ve seen are dedicated units like the Sony PRS-700BC Reader Digital Book, or devices like the iPhone or Palm derivations. While traveling, I enjoyed having the Palm unit, as it doubled and tripled as an mp3 player, note-taker, calendar, phone, etc. Of course, iPhones do the same things. Discounting the iPhone’s (and now, Palm Pre’s) comfortable form-factor and mind-destroying graphics, the iPhone and related units perform tasks normally found on full-sized machines in mediocre but not necessarily annoying ways. Applications developed specifically for hand-held “formats” work and look great.

With that said, I have recently discovered I’m not the target audience for the Amazon Kindle DX, no matter how good Martha Stewart thinks it is. The DX does everything as promised. It downloads books. It stores books. It displays books. And the large (actually, around the size of a netbook) screen displays text very nicely. Properly formatted black and white images look rich and have excellent contrast. I’m just not sure why anyone would want one. Hit the clicky thingie to read more…

The user interface has a physical element, and an on-screen element. There is a row of master keys on the right-hand side, and a little thumby-joysticky thing. At the bottom, there is a keyboard. These elements are all set up for a right-handed user. Putting all the buttons on one side means the user is forced to slide his hand up and down the right side of the DX to access the master keys. Why not put an equal number of keys on both sides of the unit, and let the user decide via software interface what operation the keys perform? The master keys have a demi-mushy feel that would have most likely been served better with a clicky-key, as on the old IBM computer keyboards, which anyone with any common sense misses. The keyboard is in a standard QWERTY configuration, with additional function keys. There is no number pad–the numbers are situated on the keys, and require a function key to access.

Similarly, the thumb-stick does not provide any satisfying tactile feedback. And like the master buttons, why not just add another thumb-stick to the left? I’m not a left-handed user, but they are a demographic to be considered. In other words, the physical components of the DX are not a “joy” to use, and are not fun, like the iPhone’s finger-slide based interface. With all the cell phones around using keyboards and joy-pads (or similar), it’s odd that Amazon seems to have completely ignored any user interface development performed by the many carriers and come up with a “solution” that isn’t nice to use.

The software of the DX is nothing to write home about. It’s running at the same general level of sophistication as early Palm-style units. You can change font size, but not style. The PDF reader works well, and the thumb-stick allows you to navigate through chapters by clicking to the right. However, you can’t do that with non-PDF files, so the user interface is inconsistent. There’s a weird section in the menu called “Experimental,” which states Amazon is working on these, “prototypes. Do you find them useful?” This includes a basic web browser, an MP3 player, and a text-to-audio reader two steps above the TRS-80 voice synthesizer. Though a sincere attempt to improve the product, I find it very odd, as it seems the Kindle engineers want to create a Kindle community, or at least get feedback from one. But it’s not a community-buidling device, so the Experimental section feels like a, “We’re sorry, we haven’t got these features quite figured out yet” section.

Last on this list of software foibles are the page-flip and page-turn speeds. There is about a half-second delay to go to a new page, or, when turning the DX sideways, for the page to go to the landscape format. Because the screen refresh also takes a fraction of a second, your eyes are momentarily dazzled by the change or switch. I think this is intolerable.

Looking at what others have to say about the Kindle in any of its forms, I will reassert that apparently, I’m not the target audience. But because the unit is so large and so non-casual to use, I find it a piece of interim hardware specifically geared toward promoting and selling the Amazon brand.

Supplementary Notes:

As an author and designer of electronic media, I was very interested in Kindle’s publishing options. I took a short children’s novel I had recently finished and put it through the Kindle DTP (digital text platform) system. It’s simple to use: you upload your stuff and hope for the best.

Kindle-published media is not the same as electronic published media. Media published specifically using the Kindle DTP requires conversion to fairly simple HTML text. Anything beyond simple HTML is pretty much up for grabs, that is, like publishing for another web browser, you can never be sure what you’re going to see when the media is viewed. On the other hand, publishing to the Kindle seems to be free, and you can post your own price for your work, as well as assign title and other salient information.

The DTP site is bare-bones, which you might think would make the operation easy to work with, but my personal experience–and maybe I was just bone-heading my way through things at two in the morning–was that if you didn’t notice the “publish” button on the side, you would have no indication where you were in the publishing process. Again, bone-head, two in the morning, but in my defense…it was late. i also had trouble with the DTP server while trying to input my personal and banking information, which was cleared up the next day.

Back to the publish button. Not knowing I had missed the button, I called Amazon’s help line, as I (naturally) had not received any, “Your book’s been published” information. They were prompt and friendly, and sent me an e-mail with help information the next day. So, there’s that.

So, the book is up, and I looked at it using the Kindle DX. Pretty much straight HTML text. I hadn’t included any pictures, as there were multiple warnings that doing so would make consistent viewing difficult, etc.

Overall, the DTP experience was positive. I’d like to see the site get a slight UI update, so I don’t miss that stupid button again. And of course, make the addition of images and interactive elements easy and consistent, probably using a templating system.

Oh, the book is called, “The Boy Who Was a Dragon,” and it’s only $4.95. Cheap!