If you know anything about Nicholson Baker, you know that he has an unparalleled talent for describing the small and ordinary things in everyday life, their textures and surfaces and the way they heft in the hand; and more than that, he’s a genius at describing the way things make you feel when you own them, or use them. After reading him, you never experience doorknobs, or shoelaces, or paperclips in quite the same way again.
So when I saw that Nicholson Baker had written a review of the Kindle 2 in this week’s New Yorker, I flipped directly to it. Since I’m never going to buy one — for one thing, I like to actually own the books I spend money on — I was looking forward to reading Baker’s description of using it. (Sure, Amazon is a DRM pusher and a bad influence upon tax legislation, but the gadget lover in me wants to know what the thing is like.) I expected that the article would be both informative and entertaining.
And Baker delivers on that expectation. In short, he kind of hates it, although ultimately he learns to tolerate it.
When he unwraps it, here is what he sees:
Within, lying face up in a white-lined casket, was the device itself. It was pale, about the size of a hardcover novel, but much thinner, and it had a smallish screen and a QWERTY keyboard at the bottom made of tiny round pleasure-dot keys that resisted pressing. I gazed at the keys for a moment and thought of a restaurant accordion.
Speaking of the keys, here’s how he describes the keyboard on the Kindle DX:
Some engineer, tasked with keyboard design, has again been struck by a divine retro-futurist fire: the result is a squashed array of pill-shaped keys that combine the number row with the top QWERTY row in a peculiar tea party of un-ergonomicism.
And he is scathing about the DRM that locks users into buying from Amazon, and only Amazon:
Kindle books aren’t transferrable. You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.
Countering Amazon’s claim about the Kindle DX that with its “large display, reading newspapers is more enjoyable than ever,” Baker says, “it’s enjoyable if you like reading Nexis printouts,” continuing:
The Kindle Times ($13.99 per month) lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography — and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie-charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles…
And so on. Plus, it was missing a random but significant handful of articles. (Incidentally, the Times Reader software, for $14.99 a month, offers most of what Baker misses in the Kindle version, plus unlimited access to the archive.) Baker also describes the history of ebook readers in their current form, and dismisses them all because he thinks the idea of e-Ink is flawed to begin with. Instead he recommends that if you want to read a book in electronic form, you should do it on an iPhone or an iPod Touch, and avail yourself of open formats as much as possible.
One last quote. In describing his reading of a best-seller on the iPod Touch and then swiching over to the Kindle, Baker says: “It was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks.”
Baker has also answered questions from readers in an online feature that I haven’t read yet.
