I asked the Globe's excellent Washington correspondent Paul Koring last month to buy an Amazon Kindle and mail it to me. If I had lived in Zimbabwe, or any one of about 100 other countries, I could have just hopped online and bought one, but not in Canada. Instead, if I wanted a copy before Amazon finally decided to make the Kindle available to Canadians (which turned out to be Tuesday of this week, about a month after most countries got it), I would have to get Paul to use his U.S. Credit card and shipping address to get one, pre-load it with books, and then send it to me. A week later, the Kindle arrived – none of its wireless capabilities worked, neither did the browser. Such was the price I had to pay for trying to skip in line.
Surely, this was the easiest way to do things. Surely, in the entire history of electronic commerce, nobody has thought up a better way to sell gadgets than to design identical versions of the same device for different markets, release them at different times and make it as difficult as possible for users in one market to purchase the same device from another. Surely, nothing creates more customer goodwill than crippling certain features of said device depending on where it's being sold, such that only users in a particular market get the gadget's full power, and everybody else doesn't.
The Kindle is a sleek, useful thing. The Kindleocracy is anything but.
Still, Amazon hypes the electronic book reader as Zeus of its retail kingdom, the single best-selling product in its catalogue of millions. It's likely to make significant waves in Canada too, as it launches just in time for the bank-busting holiday shopping season at a price of $259 (U.S.), plus shipping.
Having possession of both Canadian and American versions of the device, I can tell you they look identical. Both have a pretty brushed silver finish throughout most of the back, and a white iPod-esque panel covering the one-third of the front not occupied by the screen. The Kindle is about as wide, tall and heavy as your average paperback, but much, much thinner – about the same thickness as a slim CD jewel case.
For those new to e-readers, its important to note that the black-and-white screen uses something called e-ink to display text and images. Think of those fake plastic televisions that places such as Ikea use to show you what a real life television would look like on a KREEKANFALLIN shelving unit. You know how there's always transparencies pasted to the fake television to make it look like something's on? That's what e-ink looks like: as though someone typed out the text, printed it on a transparency, and glued it to the screen. The end result is far better than reading text on a computer screen. There's hardly a micron of glare unless you hold it directly under a light bulb, and no shift in visual quality no matter how you hold the thing. E-ink is strictly a word thing, though – the Kindle can do images, but they all look like something drawn up by a particularly talented Etch-A-Sketch artist.
The primary means of navigating through the screen is a five-function button in the bottom right corner of the Kindle that feels a bit like a track button on a laptop. You use it to jump up, down, left and right through menu options and press it down to select. There are also two large ‘Next Page' buttons on the left and right hand sides, based on the assumption that flipping pages is pretty much the core user input. There's a smaller ‘Previous Page' button, as well as Home, Menu and Back buttons.
At the bottom, below the screen, is a full keyboard. The keys feel slightly humpbacked, and typing on the Kindle is a tedious experience. The reason the keyboard there is to let you search through the Kindle store, use the built-in dictionary or (what's left of the completely gutted) web browser. The Kindle also allows you to make notes on the text you're reading, which is very handy for students. But for most folks, the most important button on the keyboard is the one that changes text size.
