In Praise of the Kindle

I picked up a reading on a Kindle again and it’s the unsung hero in my gadget repertoire.

Here I am praising a technological device despite this blog has a history of doing the opposite. Why’s that?

I don’t think it’s because the Kindle has no flaws (more on that later). I think it’s because I don’t think of my ebook reader as technology.

It’s not a gadget like the rest. Well, of course it is from a technical standpoint. But here are some characteristics that help to set it apart:

• It’s rather robust. When it falls on the floor, the screen won’t break.
• The display doesn’t glow (better for the eyeballs and a spouse who wants to sleep).
• It needs to charge only once a month.
• It fulfills its core job without needing access to the internet.
• UI and UX stay more or less the same for years if not decades.
• It doesn’t decay as fast as consumer technology does usually (a Kindle from 2012 does its job still very fine).

I see the Kindle Paperwhite screen as a very different one compared to laptops/tablets/phones. E-Ink looks dull and not very exciting, while OLED can become a really enticing window in the world. If you want to focus on one task, this can be bad.

Ebook readers are one-job-at-a-time machines. A purpose-built product by the most motivated and best-positioned service provider.

But the biggest advantage is the Kindle’s lack of any good use other than reading. When I pick up a Kindle, I read.

The KISS principle in action.

It seems to be the only way I get around to some longreads piling up in my Pocket account. While I avoid reading articles longer than 10 minutes in the browser because they seem too long, they look rather short on my Kindle — next to books (everything is relative and a lot can be explained with expectation management).

It boils down to:

< 5 minutes reading time: Smartphone

5–10 minutes reading time: Browser

> 10 minutes reading time: Kindle

On my ebook reader I read that Microsoft had a Kindle prototype in 1998. But Amazon won the market with the strategy of building the “Toyota Camry” of e-readers (everyone would buy one and hold onto it for years).

In large parts I’m happy with Amazon. They sell the hardware for cheap and host reliable services. I haven’t had a problem sending a long web article to the device for example.

But let’s face it, Amazon has not the upmost attention on the Kindle lineup (it’s the Apple TV of Amazon in that regard). Alexa gets 10k engineers while the Kindle starves.

Look at the Notes and Highlight features: What a shame that I can’t send my web article highlights directly to Twitter. I have to plug in the device via Micro-USB (!), copy a txt-file to my computer and do all the manual legwork.

That the Kindle has become a synonym for e-readers has its advantages, though. Some of the missing features are being built from passionate 3rd parties. I’m sure you heard of Calibre, the swiss army knife when it comes to managing and converting ebooks. Let me point out three more niche services:

P2K aka Pocket to Kindle automatically delivers new items from the Read-It-Later service into the Kindle reading list.

Kindle4rss does the same even one step earlier by feeding it the raw RSS files from selected websites.

In the absence of a startup that prints out your most important digital content subs and mails you a physical copy of your very personal magazine, these are wonderful stand-ins to get close to the same experience.

clippings.io is a useful organizer and manager of Notes and Highlights.

Of course, the functionality would be better integrated in case Amazon did it on its own (or bought these services).

But in this instance I won’t complain, I will shut up and read, just read.