Advantages and Disadvantages of Reading with a Kindle

Over the past month or so I’ve acquired a bunch of PDFs of books on finance and investment, and stared with the first one, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre, a fictionalised biography of the legendary trader Jesse Livermore, who was notable for shorting the market in the Great Depression.

However, reading it on laptop is the damnedest way to read anything that was designed as a book or other long-form document. I learned to read before I went to school, so I have a higher reading speed than most people. However, probably because I didn’t learn to read from a computer screen, my reading speed drops dramatically on the laptop, and it costs me 20 W of power just to hold the page on my screen. I can’t read it in anything other than a sitting position, the whole thing is a pain.  Paying for Stock Operator in book form almost starts to look attractive, but I have another 20 or so books to read like this. The reading experience needs to get better, and a Kindle could do it.

I’ve come across the Kindle before, though I hadn’t seen one, and my first reaction was along the lines of

this is like a games console or similar consumer thneed designed to create a locked down consumer space to part the simple-minded from their money.

If used as intended, that’s exactly what you get. You can get a Kindle version of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator for £9, and off you go. That’s not bad for this book if you compare the dead-tree versions, though the secondhand market will come up with the goods in real form for £6.42 at the time of writing. My copy is a PDF, and was the result of a Google search. The book was from 1923.

Monevator’s Kindle books on investing article made me think about this again, particularly as I have now collected even more PDFs from the fascinating period between 1900 and 1930 when the Haber-Bosch process of creating artificial fertiliser from natural gas hadn’t been refined, and all sorts of bizarre methods were tried in agriculture using electrical discharges.

At the same time Martin Lewis’s moneysaving expert website warmed me up to how to get a WiFi Kindle for £75-ish so I figured it was time to revisit this, so I bought one, and loaded it with PDFs. You get a 30-day trial during which you can return and get your money back less delivery if you don’t get on with it, so I figured I could take a flyer.

the total Kindle area is similar to the book, but the screen is a lot smaller

As the picture shows, a Kindle isn’t the same as a paperback, because the screen is smaller than the page of a typical paperback. And though I am middle-aged I can see easily enough that the resolution of the screen isn’t the same as a paperback, but it is far, far, closer to it than my laptop.

It’s good enough. I’ve got my normal reading speed back, it’s a lot more convenient and I can read anywhere. I’ve only read PDFs on the Kindle apart from the instruction manual, and the image quality of the result with PDFs isn’t as good as with a true Kindle book. To get a whole A4 page onto the Kindle screen results in a small and ill-defined font. However, you can spin the Kindle through 90 degress and read in landscape mode. It doesn’t reformat automatically, I would have thought an orientation switch would have been an easy win, but it can be done manually. The result is much sharper than reading the same PDF on my laptop, even though the screen is physically much larger on the laptop.

Landscape mode is easier to read on this PDF and matches the book font size more closely

So I’m a convert – but I won’t be buying from Monevator’s list yet. I don’t like paying for what I can’t touch in terms of media, and there’s no used market for Kindle books, because they’ve presumably stitched things up so you buy a license and not a product. Embodying your media in Real Stuff has the advantage of giving such monoplistic control freaks the shaft, they surrender control of the secondhand market as soon as they let go of the physical embodiment. Hoever, if I don’t buy ebooks I don’t get to eat that crow. The Kindle works well for PDFs, and Google can turn up all sorts of good stuff.

The go anywhere appeal is the best part of the Kindle, in all sorts of surprising areas. At the electronics bench, once upon a time you could have databooks with device pinouts and application data. Since the 1990s you had to print out the PDFs, and datasheets aren’t concise. With a Kindle, all the datasheets are to hand at the bench. That go anywhere feature is what makes this transformational. For other people it will be having recipes in the kitchen to hand, or workshop manuals in the shed – all places where taking a laptop is doable, but a right pain.

Oh an if you haven’t got a PDF creator, Google docs creates PDFs if you want to print something, as the cloud hasn’t got access to your print drivers. The Kindle can take these too, so you don’t have to pay the Adobe corporation for the privilege of using your Kindle. Two proprietary closed shops designed to part the punter from their money circumvented at a stroke

The Kindle works for me. I have my reading speed back, I don’t have to put up with the intermittent noise of a fan and I can focus on what I’m reading as I used to be able to with paper. There are things wrong with the Kindle, colour would be nice, the screen could be 1.5 times bigger, the sturm und drang on the screen associated with a page turn isn’t so great, though it is over quicker than a page turn. It would be nice if it would slowly scroll the page itself as you can do in Word. But I’m carping here – the overall experience delivers.