Is Amazon’s Kindle the Solution to my FedEx bill?

Okay, I have to admit I am a gadget-freak. My husband continually gives me grief because I can justify any technology purchase by saying “but I’m a Media Psychologist. I HAVE to know PERSONALLY how it feels to use these things.” So, right after I got the Wii and the iPod touch, I decided I should investigate Amazon’s Kindle. Two things, or maybe three, pushed me over the edge. First, Amazon lowered the price. I may be a world-class rationalizer, but I am not insensitive to price points. Second, a friend showed me his, demonstrating the feature that allows you to increase the type size so you can read it on a treadmill. This allowed me to rationalize that it would encourage me to exercise. I thought that was a particularly good one. Third, every time I travel from Boston, our world headquarters, to the west coast, where I escape every time I find the weather challenging on the east coast (i.e. a lot!), I end up FedEx-ing the pile of articles that I am using in whatever project I am behind on, which is pretty much all of them. It’s either that or reprint them all which drives my uber-green daughter absolutely nuts. (And admittedly uses a lot of energy, paper, and ink–not to mention the man-hours collating, stapling and filing them into binders.)

The Kindle is a fairly slick little item. It is about a 7 on a scale of 10, but the whole concept just reeks of potential. The positives are: it’s very light, it fits in my purse, it holds a lot of stuff when you add a $30 4G memory SD card, the battery life is good, it downloads from Amazon in a flash, the screen-saver illustrations are swell, and it has notation capabilities.

The negatives are: it’s black and white, the notation is slow and laborious and if you aren’t careful where you put your documents, you easily run out of memory, I accidentally turn a lot of pages when I don’t mean to, it’s hard to skim, Kindle books are priced way too high for the fact that no paper is involved, and (the biggie), it doesn’t read PDF files.

It’s the last one that I was counting on to solve my FedEx dilemma. I should disclose that I use a Mac and Kindle does read .mobi format which is a WIndows-based conversion program. I haven’t hauled out my old HP to see if that actually works. If a PDF file was made from a text-based document, I can convert it to text using Acrobat and drag it to my Kindle and it reads pretty well, some formatting issues aside. I had visions of dragging my entire PDF library onto this thing to read at my leisure, but it’s not there yet. I haven’t given up on making it work better for me in that regard and I have to say, while waiting for my husband in the cell-phone lot at LAX, I got bored with an article on Cognitive Landscapes and downloaded Patricia Cornwall’s latest Kay Scarpetta mystery (a good move for keeping me awake since the plane was late.)

Will the Kindle replace old-fashioned paper-based reading? No, certainly not. Kindle doesn’t have the gestalt of the cup-of-tea, reading-by-the-fire-on-a-cozy-afternoon thing going at all. At least not yet. In my mind, it’s a solution for different goals–somewhere between convenience and save-the-planet.

My bottom line is that the Kindle is pretty good and I will use it, but it’s not close enough to perfect to make it satisfying either in the old-fashioned way or in the super-cool way an iPod touch was the first time I used it. What it does make me think is this: when Apple gets on this case, watch out. Color, a touch screen, PDF compatibility, and the ability to use handwritten notations like a notebook computer will blow the current Kindle out of the water. And, as a Media Psychologist, I will definitely be one of the first to buy one!