reader.ly

I read Pride and Prejudice about once every 18 months, each time discovering some new detail that I had missed previously. It was a good choice, then, for my first assessment of the Kindle 2, a test that would determine whether I could get into the flow state that Jeff Bezos refers to. When I was a child, I could easily ignore perfect summer weather (and in Minnesota, those days are even more cherished) while curled up in a chair with a stack of books from the library. Told by my mom to get some fresh air, I’d just drag my books outside, ignoring calls to play from my sister, and read until it was time to do chores or come in for dinner. That is flow.

Now that I have children who wake up at 7am regardless of how late I stay up reading, and who furthermore require food every few hours in addition to clean clothes and mental stimulation, I can’t indulge my reading habits as often as I’d like. So when I do read, it has to be worth it, because there is little chance that once engrossed in a book, that I’ll be able to put it down like a sensible person at 10pm and wait until 8pm the next evening to resume.

Pride and Prejudice is one of those works that merits a couple of too-late nights; every meeting between Elizabeth and Darcy that ends unsatisfactorily, with confusion and missed cues on both sides, merely makes you hope for another chance to bring them together again on the next page. Read on the Kindle, the absurdities of the characters that populate Pride and Prejudice are just as hilarious, and the advancements and setbacks that the Bennet girls encounter on their path to marriage just as entertaining. I found, however, that while I could lose myself easily in the novel, once I attempted to use features that enabled the kind of reader-text interaction that Bezos touts as the advantage of the Kindle, I felt thwarted in my effort to engage, like the consummate outsider at a ball.

The main feature I was interested in testing was note-taking, as the ability to bookmark doesn’t offer you anything that napkins and receipts can’t. I haven’t had to take notes since college, but now that I’m writing about books again, I like the idea of being struck by an insight or question so compelling that the only thing to do is to immediately capture the thought before it evaporates in the face of daily life. Remembering without a Blackberry alert and a few sticky notes that Picture Day is on Friday is hard enough; remembering to follow up on questions of social disruption caused by the encampments of soldiers among England’s landed gentry during the Napoleonic wars altogether impossible.

Since I hadn’t bothered with any buttons other than Next Page when reading the first few books on the Kindle, I eagerly typed my first note. And was flummoxed. The keyboard is so small and the buttons so close together that I couldn’t help but mistype constantly. Moreover, the keys are difficult to press, a feature which I’m sure prevents accidental searching for words like “fesd” or “juik” but which also means that the effort required to edit a note is not worth it. And yet, one doesn’t wish to read a great work of literature and leave notes strewn with typos. For example, my note on the passage in Chapter 10 where Elizabeth and Darcy are debating the “hypothetical” character of a man (Bingley) who is easily swayed by the opinion of his friend reads: foreshadowim the incident wen darcy gtes bimgley to leave neth. Much easier to keep a laptop open and type notes on a separate screen as you read, than to try to write anything worth saving on the Kindle. Granted, not having to carry a laptop with you is certainly valuable. But then please remove the necessity by making the keyboard more usable.

I tend to read quickly, and so I’m used to paging back a chapter to see if I missed a cue or to review a character’s original appearance. Reading Pride and Prejudice on the Kindle, I couldn’t do that as the load time would have made going back page by page unbearable. The text search function is infinitely more efficient, but you lose the quick plot review and occasional fresh insights that you get when skimming through a book manually.

This won’t be the case for most Kindle users, but I am prone to tendonitis in both hands. Although the Kindle is relatively light, it requires a pincer grip to hold it properly while reading in bed, for instance, which means that by the time I’ve lost myself in “the flow” my hands and wrists are feeling twitchy. It’s possible to use pillows to prop up the Kindle, but it also slides around due to the smooth casing, and at any rate you still need to keep your thumb on the Next Page button. A paper book doesn’t cause the same issues because you don’t need to turn the pages as frequently, and when you do, it doesn’t require as much pressure to do so.

Despite the Kindle’s drawbacks, in the end I’m a convert. I love getting as many of the classics as I want downloaded for free, getting new releases (relatively) cheaply, and having multiple books accessible on a single, thin device. Not having to go to the bookstore or library makes the whole experience feel magical, like you’re wishing for The Lost Symbol, and two minutes later, poof! it appears like a phoenix rising from a pile of electronic ink, ready to take flight.