Amazon Kindle 2 Review

By Jim on March 4th, 2009

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DRM and Proprietary Book Formats
I can’t complete this review without mentioning the drawbacks of Amazon’s DRM. As we have seen with music DRM, sometimes a company exits a business and the customers who have bought DRM-laden products end up screwed because they can no longer access the product they paid for.

Amazon has DRM as part of its Kindle 2 books. The Kindle 2 currently supports .MOBI, .PRC, text files, and Amazon’s proprietary AZW format. It does not natively support PDF files but you can email them and have them converted for ten cents per book. Nor does it support the open ePub ebook format though I hope that Amazon eventually adds support for this and other formats in future Kindle software releases.

So what happens if Amazon goes out of business? Or what happens if it exits the e-books business? What will happen to your book collection? Will you be able to convert your books out of the Amazon proprietary format and into a more open format?

As far as I can tell, no. If Amazon were to vanish suddenly from the face of the earth, I’m not sure how you would go about moving your AZW formatted books to another reader or another format. This is something to bear in mind if you are going to build a book collection. I have found no statement from Amazon that covers what they would do if they left the ebook business.

For my part, I’m not going to worry too much about the DRM or format part of this right now. Why? Because I finally have a device that I’m truly comfortable reading on for hours on end while laying on the couch or laying on my bed. So I’m going to give Amazon a temporary pass on this simply because the reader in me has been so hungry for a viable ebook reader for so long.

But I will be keeping my eye on the DRM issue and if somebody else comes out with a reader that is as good as the Kindle while also providing access to as much modern content then I might consider switching. While Amazon is certainly one of the most prominent companies selling ebooks, it’s not the only one.

And things can easily change. Amazon should not take its position for granted and it needs to clearly articulate what it would do for its customers if it left the ebook business. Would it set their books free? Or would they lose everything they’ve paid for already?

Only Amazon knows…

Problems with the Kindle 2
As much as I like the Kindle 2, it’s not without its problems. First of all, I would not mind a color screen. Yes, I know that right now color e-ink screens aren’t really available but it’s something that I look forward to very much. I think it would add quite a bit to the photos and illustrations included in books and magazines on the Kindle. There are color screens in development apparently but nothing appears to be imminent that would be affordable for the average Joe or Jane.

Speaking of screens, since the Kindle 2′s screen is not back-lit you can’t read it in the dark without some other kind of light. I’m not complaining as back-lit screens irritate my eyes after a while. But it would be nice if there were a light built-in to the Kindle 2 that could be turned on to provide illumination from the top of the Kindle 2 or perhaps the sides. I’m thinking of a very small, built-in kind of lighting. I actually ended up ordering a clip-on light for my Kindle 2 so that I can more easily read at night without having to have a bright light on in the room I’m in.

Another thing I noticed was the lack of folders or labels to more easily organize books via genre or some other classification methodology. Right now the books just appear in a list that you have to navigate through and that’s fine if you only have a few books. But, since the Kindle 2 can probably hold around 1500 books, Amazon desperately needs to find a way to make it easier and faster to find a particular book in your collection.

One of the advantages to ebooks supposedly is the price and, most of the time, this is true. The ebook version is usually significantly cheaper than the print version and that’s as it should be. But sometimes I’ve noticed that some ebooks are simply too expensive. Anything over $9.99 is too much in my book and I simply won’t more for an ebook, but it seems that some publishers have tried to push prices higher. Shame on them and they should know that they’ve lost my money.

One of the more controversial things that Amazon did was to remove the SD card from the Kindle 2. This has angered Kindle 1 owners who have considered upgrading. For me it’s not really an issue as the 2GB storage that comes with the Kindle 2 is plenty plus Amazon keeps a copy of your book collection on its servers. So if you need to delete a book you can always download it again later.

The lack of a replaceable battery has angered some people but I really could care less. Why? Well as a buyer of Apple products I’ve gotten used to it and it has never really been an issue for me. At some point it might be but I’m not going to sweat it too much right now.

One annoying thing though is that there’s no cover included with the Kindle 2. I ordered the leather one for $29.99 but it hasn’t arrived as I write this review. It would be nice if some kind of sleeve or something had been included. Although I can’t complain too much as I’ve found it perfectly fine to just hold the Kindle in my hand while reading, I don’t actually need a case for it.

But I still like having something to put it in when I’m not reading as I do have a parrot that likes to chew plastic. I live in terror of him focusing on my Kindle 2 while it’s on the coffee table (he dive bombs down onto the coffee table to raid my TV remote controls and other devices and I have to scramble to move him back over to his cage…he’s quite diabolical at timing his raids when I’m not paying attention).

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