BatFlattery

My Kindle arrived yesterday, so I thought I’d write up my impressions after a day or so of use:

• It’s really small and light. It’s as easy to hold in your hand as a thin paperback, definitely better for long reading sessions than the iPad.
• The build quality is very good, given that it’s plastic. The matte graphite grey colour is a vast improvement on the glossy white of previous Kindles. It’s nicely rounded, and the back is slightly rubbery, feels soft and grips well.
• The e-ink display is totally unlike an LCD display. On the plus side, it looks pretty much like ink on paper, so is easy to read, and has a great viewing angle.
• On the minus side, the screen update when you turn a page  looks weird (screen seems to flash to inverted) and is visibly slow. No nice page-turning animations! But you do get used to it.
• I also had to get used to the non-touch screen! But turning pages with the buttons is in some ways less intrusive, as gestures on the iPad Kindle app are sometimes misinterpreted.
• The screen is also monochrome, and not backlit. It can represent illustrations, obviously not in colour. If I ever get a book with colour illustrations, I will probably look at them in the Kindle app on my iPad!
• Setting up wifi was quick and painless (I didn’t get the 3G version). My purchased books were downloaded in seconds.

Overall I’m very happy with it, and feel that a standalone e-book reader is definitely worth it, even if you have an iPad. It just adds flexibility, as you can still use your iPad when it makes sense; the synchronisation feature means you can switch between the Kindle iPad app and the actual Kindle with no need to hunt for your place. And for the price, it’s quite a bargain. You can get it from Amazon here.

Updated 3 September: I’ve been trying out a range of books, and I’m starting to feel frustrated by the lack of a touch screen. Navigation is really clumsy compared with the Kindle app on the iPad. With the touchscreen, you just touch the bookmark to set it, scrub to where you want to go back to with the progress indicator, then jump back to the bookmark using the pop-up window. To go to a footnote, just tap on it, then tap on the number next to the footnote to go back to the text. All of this is much more laborious on the Kindle, especially footnotes, which you have to navigate to with the four-way cursor controller. It’s the usual frustration of an electronic device with no pointing mechanism: lots of button-pushing. I’d seriously consider only reading a book that had lots of footnotes on the iPad.

On the plus side, I really like the random engravings, drawings etc which appear on the Kindle’s screen when you put in standby. The e-ink screen doesn’t draw any power after it has been updated, so this doesn’t drain the battery, and is an elegant and tasteful way to show the device is in standby. It’s a really nice touch.

I just ordered the new slimline Kindle that Amazon are taking pre-orders for. I’ve never liked the look of the previous Kindles, too bulky, white and angular, but this new one is slim, with curved edges, and a graphite grey that looks pretty cool. It’s also much thinner and smaller, although it retains the same size e-ink display as older Kindles (but the display is higher resolution).

But the best thing about it is the price: £109 for the Wifi version! The 3G version is more, but if you’re happy to be able to download books only while on wifi, you can save £40 and use it to get a case.

I’ve been using my iPad for reading ebooks (using both Apple’s iBook app and the iPad Kindle app), and while the iPad display is great for reading, and supports the cool page-turn animations, the iPad is quite big and bulky to use for reading, much bigger than a paperback and even a hardback. And if you have only one iPad in the house, using it for long periods of time just for reading is going to cause some opposition from those who want it for other things…

So I think that a dedicated ebook reader does make sense, especially at that price. I went ahead and ordered it, not quite on launch day, and was surprised to see it was already “sold out” (my delivery estimate was early September, but obviously that may have moved out by now). I think this is going to be a huge success for Amazon, and may finally bring ebooks into the mainstream.

OK, this is the end. The first couple of Harry Potter books were quite fun, although nothing near justifying the enormous hype surrounding them. But then it became increasingly obvious that Rowling was starting to believe her own press, while the books became longer and more tedious, Bloomsbury obviously unwilling to exercise any sort of editorial control and risk somewhere between a third and a half of their profits walking out the door. And now this.

In an interview with Time magazine, Rowling says she is “not a huge fan of fantasy” and is trying to subvert the genre.

Excuse me? What are you smoking, lady? Go and read Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy. Read it and weep. That’s subverting the genre. What you are doing is trotting out the same old “children discover an alternate magical world” schtick that wasn’t new when CS Lewis wrote the Narnia books. Yes, you’ve given it a glossy update, you’re clever with names, and you’re inventive with the mechanics of magic, but subverting the genre? Please. You have to know a genre to do that, and you didn’t even finish Lord of the Rings!

Actually the hack who wrote the article comes across just as dumb. The whole article is just so full of shit it’s laughable. How’s this?

It’s precisely Rowling’s lack of sentimentality, her earthy, salty realness, her refusal to buy into the basic clichés of fantasy, that make her such a great fantasy writer.

Oh, come on: the Potter books contain every fantasy cliché ever invented. Sure, it’s cutely done, but original? More “earthy, salty and real” than Lord of the Rings? You must be joking. Even the scenes that take place in “Muggle” England have this sort of cute glaze to them, an American tourist’s view. No council flats, no graffiti, no chavs.

The genre tends to be deeply conservative – politically, culturally, psychologically. It looks backward to an idealized, romanticized, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves.

Does that sound like any fantasy you’ve been reading lately?

Of course, this is the same Time magazine which started the whole Potter hype in America, which naturally didn’t have anything to do with the fact that Time Warner’s publishing arm Scholastic had just bought the US rights to the Potter series. But I mean, come on, what kind of hack journalism is that? Regurgitating clichés just proves that you can’t be bothered to do the most elementary research.

Research that might have turned up, oh, say Terry Pratchett, who has for years been turning out Discworld books like clockwork (probably two or three for every one that Rowling eventually squeezes out of her constipated creativity), books that really do blur genres (the City Watch subseries is brilliant police procedural for example) and really do subvert the fantasy genre (eg Granny Weatherwax’s insistence that magic is mostly “headology”). In fact you’d have to go a long way to find a smarter, more self-aware, versatile, polished, sheerly creative, and laugh-out-loud-funny writer than Pratchett. Compared to him, Rowling is rank amateur with a long way to go.

Anyway, it’s good to see Pratchett attempting to put the record straight, even if the good ole Beeb tries to make it sound like sour grapes. I especially liked his take on her claim that she didn’t even know Potter was fantasy until the first book was published. Didn’t the “wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, hidden worlds, jumping chocolate frogs, owl mail, magic food, ghosts, broomsticks and spells… give her a clue?”

Good news is that she doesn’t intend to write any fantasy after the last of the promised seven-book series. I’m giving up earlier than that; I haven’t bought any of the books since “Goblet of Fire” and now I never will. I may even buy one of these T-shirts (spoiler alert: don’t click link if you don’t want to know which major character dies in the latest outing).

I just finished the latest Discworld outing, Going Postal. It’s definitely one of the better ones, a wry take on City types as Ankh Morpork has its version of the Internet boom. The clacks, a system of communication by semaphor that has played minor parts in previous books, takes centre stage here, complete with obssessive techies and even hackers. No, really. I also enjoyed the return of the golems, and even though they have overcome the tragedy that befell them in Feet of Clay, they remain tinged with melancholy. And Vetinari is in top form as always. Highly recommended.