Kindle: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

So I bought a Kindle. I originally had declared I would never do such a thing, but after contemplating the hundreds of dollars I would spend printing PDF documents, I decided a $140 Kindle would be worth it in the long run. I also had a couple of people praise the virtues of a Kindle when studying for qualifying exams, and since my eyes get really tired when I read on a computer screen and most of the next three years I will be staring at PDF documents, I was rather persuaded by it all. I'm hoping the Kindle will help preserve me from eye-strain headaches and living in poverty surrounded by paper (Bleak House allusion--you should read it, which is currently my favorite novel of all time; it might be free on Kindle).

I was excited to get it and try it out, but since then, I've had mixed feelings/results with its success. My thoughts are related to both book history and my personal preferences, to both the form of the Kindle itself and program flaws and things Kindle has no control over, and to convenience.

The Good

• You can download novels instantly for mostly cheap prices.
• It holds thousands of books, which for me would be good since I have now five bookcases that are bursting.
• It keeps your notes all together (a plus when studying for qualifying exams).
• It's light and easy to hold.
• You can adjust the text size and screen rotation.
• It's easy on the eyes with it's cool "electronic ink."
• It even recognizes line and word units in non-OCRed PDF documents, which makes it nice for putting in notes (more on this under Bad and Ugly).
• The battery life amazingly long; evidently LCD screens are the main reason why laptops and iPhones, etc., have terrible battery life.
• You can download notes and highlighted passages to your computer (a plus when studying for qualifying exams).
• This is actually an annoying thing, but from a book history perspective it's fascinating. So, by default, you can see the "popular" highlights of other readers of a particular book. Isn't that cool! You can see exactly what other people find interesting in books. It makes the study of readership, the reading experience, etc., amazingly possible/easy. Book historians of the future will love it. But at the same time, I don't care what other people underline when I'm reading a book. Fortunately, this feature can be turned off.

The Bad

• Some publishers' prices are absolutely ridiculous (sometimes the Kindle book is MORE than the paperback).
• There are no page numbers.
• With old books, you have no idea what edition it is, though you can buy more expensive versions of the book that are edited properly. I haven't bought one of these yet, but I'm planning on it to see what it is like.
• You can't lend books unless the other person has a Kindle.
• You can't get rid of/resell/burn books you don't like, need, or want anymore. Deleting feels like a waste of money and is not satisfying at all. Could you imagine a used Kindle-book bookstore? Buy a book for a discounted price in the old Kindle format! Buy a book with someone else's highlights and notes! That's definitely wouldn't work...
• It's really hard to "go to" a place in the book; yes, you can search, but you can't just flip to chapter 10 or page 50 where you know a cool quote is. The bookmark feature is also integrated into the notes and highlights, which is annoying because you have to flip through it all to find the bookmarks.
• It's really hard to navigate notes, bookmarks, highlights, etc. (design flaw, yes)
• It's harder to browse books and flip through books and read various excerpts before deciding to buy them.
• If a book isn't OCRed, you can't highlight anything, and most of what I read is not OCRed.

The Ugly

• The sensual pleasure of book reading is gone (just don't think about that one too much).
• Holding a piece of synthetic plastic just isn't the same as paper (which I think of as more natural, but I know is really not...)
• I can't write in the margins, and typing in notes is hard and slow.
• The percentage marker at the bottom of the screen is totally and completely and irrevocably annoying. What in the world does it mean that I'm 10% of the way through a book? It's a different 10% than in the last book I read, and the next book I read it will be still different. 10% is relative. When I read an actual physical book, I can feel how far I am through it, and I can estimate how long it will take me to get through. But with the Kindle, there's just that annoying "loading bar" at the bottom with a percent. I don't know how long it will take to get halfway through the bar, and it's different with every book. For instance, I read The Hunger Games on Kindle (it was $4), and that took me roughly five or six hours to read. Now I'm reading the first book of The Sword of Truth series (also $4), and I've read it for about three hours, and I'm only 20% of the way through the book. This is one of the ugliest things about the Kindle. At the same time, though, I don't know of a solution unless the traditional pages are placed back in. I like the tyranny of the page; it brings order. The Kindle has "locations," but for any given book there are thousands of "locations" and I have no idea what that means. Is it by sentence? by paragraph? by traditional page? Who knows.
• Since it's all electronic, old books have to be uploaded in certain ways to make them best for Kindle usage, which is not really a Kindle problem but annoying all the same. Here we have the limitations of technology. People like to think technology is liberating, but it just redefines and confines in a different totalitarian system than what we had before. It's a new paradigm , but it's still a paradigm.

Conclusions
The Kindle is useful but very annoying (something like a spouse, I've heard), and at least for me, it will never replace the book.