Why Amazon's Kindle Doesn't Light My Fire

I was predisposed to falling in love with my Kindle, Amazon's new e-reader. Three simple reasons:

• I love reading.
• I like Amazon's bookstore,
• My real-life bookshelves are sagging from the weight.

It's hard to imagine that just a week ago the media was comparing Kindle to the iPhone. Well, I know the iPhone and I now know the Kindle, and Kindle, you're no Jack Kennedy.

The Kindle is Amazon's electronic book reader. It costs $399, and you can subsequently download books from Amazon.com for $9.99 a book. There are a number of things that the Kindle does well. It's got an astounding battery life, it's the perfect weight and size, and it can hold audio and music as well—and lots of it. The most amazing thing is its ability to reach out to the Kindle bookstore, the web, and Wikipedia (with no additional charge) almost seamlessly through WhisperNet, its EV-DO-based technology. But after using it every day for a week, I've got a laundry list of details (and we know where God lives) that make it almost, but not quite, worth the price of admission.

I could forgive the looks: Much of the criticism of the Kindle has been skin-deep. We all agree; it does not look or feel very sexy—especially if you're making those comparisons to Apple's iPhone. Me, I'd settle for ugly but sensible, but it's worth mentioning the Kindle looks like a Taiwanese knockoff.

In the name of battery life: The Kindle's long battery life obviously comes at the expense of some other important things like screen brightness, the ability to use a cursor to select single words, and more.

Ergonomics: Taking Kindle in your hands is a daunting task because the edges of the unit are the oversized key-press bars you'll use for moving forward and backward between the pages of your book. Picking up the Kindle without accidentally turning the page requires the skill of a surgeon.

Keyboard lag time: Sure, the Kindle lets you take notes in a pop-up window or enter a search term to pop up a dictionary or search the web, but the typing entry is so slow that I kept clicking the keys twice, thinking my key-presses were not registering.

The silver thermometer cursor: The thing that looks like a piece of mercury sliding up and down as you move the scroll wheel is actually the equivalent of a screen cursor. Clicking the scroll wheel lets you navigate menus. Depending on the sunlight in the room, the silver square is not very easily seen.

My kingdom for a stylus: Readers tend to be people who like to point at things. To look up a word in the dictionary (a very handy Kindle feature) you need to move the silver cursor to the line of text where the word appears. Click and you'll see all of the keywords in that sentence defined—not just yours. Try and highlight a word and you can't—just a full line of text.

E-Ink does not belong in the bedroom: E-ink, the technology used in the Kindle has the high contrast of paper but ultra-low power consumption. It gives the viewer the experience of reading from paper. The typeface is dark gray and the background page is lighter gray. I understand that Amazon didn't want to put a backlight into the Kindle because backlighting is hard on the eyes and a battery guzzler. But the number one reason I'd buy an e-book reader is to be able to read in bed without disturbing my long-suffering husband. You still need a reading lamp; make no mistake about it.

Wrong books: Sour grapes, maybe, but none of the six books I've written or edited are Kindle-available, nor are any of The Princeton Review Guides (a company I work with). I'd pay $399 for an e-book reader if I was a student (you'd recap the cost of the unit in a semester by saving money on textbooks) or a reader of journals—medicine, law, etc. But for book junkies like me (I read two books by Steves: Colbert and Martin), it's tougher to justify the price (and the more complex an illustration, the worse it looks on the Reader).

Too few words on a page: Great news that the font size is adjustable for those of us with less than perfect vision, but with the medium-sized font I got 16 lines with eight or nine words per line compared to 25 plus lines that most novels display. Each time you click to a new page the screen goes black for an instant while it refreshes. Disconcerting if you're looking for a flow.

Screen burn-in?: Don't hold me to this one because it's still early, but I'm starting to see the signs of image burn-in on the screen, especially when I go out to visit the Kindle Store.

My connection died! As I went to do a last sanity check on this somewhat disappointing report, my Kindle connection seems to have gone kaput. I get absolutely no reception anywhere. Investigating that problem as soon as the West Coast wakes up.

The Kindle bookstore experience: Despite the litany, it's thrilling to hold an e-book in your hand and see how far the technology has come. Having an entire bookstore on your lap is way cool, especially when it's a bookstore like Amazon that already knows my likes and dislikes. Once my complaint list gets whittled down a bit, I'm there.

Bottom line: Another step closer to the perfect book reader, but still no cigar.