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In this photo made Oct. 2, 2009, a student uses a Kindle during class at Pace University in New York. The Kindle is finally coming to Canada. Amazon.com announced Tuesday that the popular ebook reader, with its high-resolution 15-centimetre screen, is now available to Canadians.Mark Lennihan/The Canadian Press

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.

At its core, the Kindle is designed for reading, and it does that pretty well. It'll let you place as many bookmarks as you like, make notes or save clippings, all of which are subsequently easily accessible. Because it hardly takes any power to keep the e-ink on screen, my American Kindle lasted for more than a week on a single charge. I assume the Canadian version lasts just as long, though the wireless capabilities drain the battery quicker.

Wireless is what ultimately separates the Kindle from the other e-readers available in Canada right now. The Kindle uses it in two ways. The first and by far most prominent is access to the Kindle store. This is where users can buy books and download them in about a minute or two, as long as they're somewhere where the Kindle can leech onto a wireless network (pretty much anywhere Bell, Telus or Rogers has a presence, though none of these companies will admit who's actually running the Kindle's wireless connectivity in Canada).

The second use of wireless is for the Kindle's text-based web browser. Amazon lists this service under a menu heading called "Experimental." There's really nothing experimental about the browser: it's painfully slow and has a hissy fit every time it comes across a web page with images. However "Experimental" is Amazon's way of telling you not to complain too much if you think the service sucks. Also included under the "Experimental" menu is an MP3 player and a text-to-speech function, and boy, do both those functions suck.

The Kindle has stereo speakers in the back, and you can use them as speakers or plug in a pair of headphones. The MP3 player only runs in the background, and you pretty much just have to remember that you should hold down the ALT key and spacebar to stop or start the music. Transferring MP3s to the Kindle is as easy as plugging it to a computer using the USB cable provided, and dragging some files over. But the sound quality is simply awful. The sixth-generation Kindle might render MP3-players obsolete, but this one sure doesn't.

The text-to-speech feature will likely prove a lot more useful. Simply put, the Kindle will read the book aloud to you. Only problem is, the reader drones on in a robotic monotone that is amusing at first and then increasingly infuriating. Anyone who can listen to the Kindle robot read more than a couple of pages without throwing the gadget out the window likely has no other choice to consume the book. In fairness, if you can't read the text or get a copy of the audio book, this can be a pretty useful tool. Doesn't change the fact that it sounds miserable, though.

Funny thing about the text-to-speech function: it doesn't work for all books. It's not a technology thing, just a rights issue. For reasons I can't explain, some books don't come with permission for the Kindle robot to read them to you. Is this because it might cut into audio-book sales? Is it a regional thing?

You'll find yourself asking a lot of these kinds of questions when using the Kindle, especially in Canada. I tried downloading an e-book from the Kindle store. After failing to find a couple of titles I was looking for (Amazon says there are 360,000 books, newspapers and magazines at the store), I decided to select something from the "Editor's Picks" list. The first pick was Twilight , but when I clicked on it, I was simply told that the title was "not currently available." Why? Is it just not available in Canada? Did Amazon run out of digital copies in a development that shatters everything I thought I knew about computers? Why even include it as a top pick? I don't have an answer for you.

When I tried to use the Canadian Kindle's web browser, I was greeted with the following message: "Due to local restrictions, web browsing is not available for all countries." Why? Did the carriers not want to offer Kindle users free Internet? Did Amazon just not bother including the feature? How come I can access the English Wikipedia site, but no other site? I don't have an answer for you.

Amazon employs Digital Rights Management on the books it sells you. In short, this means the company has a whole lot of say over how you can use those books. The digital books you buy from Amazon won't work in the same way the MP3s you buy from Amazon will, for example - you can't throw them onto any other e-reader you like. In my opinion, this is the single most compelling reason not to pick up a Kindle. I have a very hard time recommending anything that uses DRM, but I also recognize that for many folks who just want to read a digital book and don't care what rights Amazon retains over the product, it doesn't really matter. Still, if you're going to buy Kindle books, read all the fine print especially carefully.

(On a related note, the single best Kindle experience I had involved downloading a free copy of Dracula from the Project Gutenberg website, loading it on the device and reading it. There's libraryloads of free books out there, and if you want to, you can simply skip the book-buying process altogether and just read works whose authors are long-dead and whose copyright has expired).



It's a shame all these tangential issues cast a dark shadow on what is, at its core, a pretty good e-reader. The Kindle isn't more convenient than a book - I'd take a dead-tree book over the digital version anywhere from an airplane to a bathroom. But the Kindle is far, far, more convenient than 1,500 books, which is how many it can hold. Not to mention all the magazines and newspaper subscriptions available. The design is sleek and simple and it feels like something your parents can pick up and use, which is pretty much the benchmark for electronic success these days.

But there's one more reason you probably shouldn't buy it.

There's little doubt that once the publishing world reaches some kind of cohesive policy on digital books, and e-books become more mainstream, the Kindle will be remembered as the iPod of the industry - the device that started the revolution. And if this were two years ago, when the Kindle first launched in the U.S., I'd be more inclined to recommend it. But as it is, we're two years late to the party in Canada and it looks like a bunch of other e-readers are either out there already or coming soon. You can try Sony's offerings, which aren't nearly as hamstrung by DRM but lack wireless connectivity. However, Sony has plans to launch a wireless reader before the end of the year. You can wait for the Nook from Barnes and Noble, which looks amazing but won't be out anywhere for at least another month. Hell, even the bigger-screen, $500 Kindle DX is due out in Canada some time next year.

Hype and name recognition alone will likely sell cases upon cases of Kindles in Canada. And on a technical level, the product is a good one. The downsides are two: the Kindle ecosystem is terrible, hampered by DRM issues and regional restrictions, and there are probably better offerings hitting the market soon.

If you don't need a Kindle right this minute, wait.

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