I pondered ordering the Kindle for over a year. Well over a year. These are just a few of the thoughts that went through my head. Then, the Kindle 2 was released and it happened to be my birthday. Next thing you know, I’ve tripped and fallen on the order key.

My thought was that I would hate it and end up sending it back. Seven days later, my Kindle2 and I are having a torrid affair and you would have to pry it from my cold dead hand to get it back from me.

Here’s why:

1. It’s pretty. I’m sorry, I’m a girl and I get distracted by shiny objects. Being a geek as well, it helps if said shiny objects are gadgets as well. This thing is just slick looking. They buttons are well placed. It is slender and lightweight. The joystick is highly functional and the keypad is extremely easy to click even if you have nails. In fact, a trained monkey could use this thing (I apologize to any trained monkeys peeping in, no disparagement intended). They have made it that user friendly.

2.I had 102 classic books lined up. The freebie ones to try it out. When I started my Kindle2, those books downloaded faster than ants to the picnic. They were suddenly just there. And I live in po-dunk middle of nowhere. Low bandwidth wifi service central people. It was super sexy.

3.It really is easy to read. Sunlight, indoors, whatever. The screen looks as like paper as anyone could hope for. If you are a fast reader, the loading time from page to page is really not an issue, because you have read the last sentence on the prior page ahead and the words are still kind of hitting your brain while it loads. The page turning buttons are a lot easier to hit than say, flipping a page in a real book while lying in bed, having said page get caught up on the covers, and having to adjust to get it squared away. There is no funky hand numbing or awkward pinky page keeping. In fact, it is so comfortable, that I’ve fallen asleep holding it about 4 out of the last 7 days. I wake up and its still exactly where it was when I conked, having turned itself off for my convenience. No kidding, I wake up and its so lightweight that I’m still holding it upright in the same spot.

4.Sampling? No kidding?! No more buying a book then suffering through it because you’ve bought it and well, once paid for you may as well read it even if it IS the driest book ever published. If you are interested in a book, you simply grab a sample and make sure its tolerable. No muss, no fuss. And purchasing if you like it is of course super easy.

5.The memory slot issue. Okay, okay, I get that its great to have a ton of little memory cards hanging around with all of your books faithfully stored and….oh wait no, I don’t get it. Why? If you are switching to digital, why continue to clutter your world with book storage. Amazon will hold them for you! Really. Big hairy deal people. I would have memory cards all over the place and have no idea what is on them.

6.The text-to-speech function. Hrm. Wouldn’t know, haven’t touched it. I read. The whole brouhaha over this little bit of functionality is ridiculous. No one wants to listen to an entire book read in computerized speech. If you are a true reader, someone who is in it to ride the imagination train, ignore this function. If you are visually impaired, I’m happy that they added this and hope that it allows you a better opportunity to read.

7.Battery life. I’ve been on it for 7 days and have had to charge it once. Even then it was only down maybe halfway and was charged simply because it was convenient to set it down and walk away at that time. I do turn the whispernet off for normal daily use.

8.The best charging cable ever. Period. There is a little firewire looking plug on one end that slips into the bottom of your Kindle. The other end is a usb connector with an adapter that plugs over it for wall charging. I flipped out when I pulled it out of the box and realized what it was. Could someone please send Apple pictures of this? My iPod cable is not nearly as sexy and trying to charge it on the fly gets old. This is the type of connecting cable that every device sold should come with. Hands down.

The 2 problems I have with my Kindle:

1.The major buttons on both sides are for the next page. For some reason, my brain wants a prior page button on the left side and the next page button on the right. The Kindle is training me quickly though and I should expect I’ll be used to it in no time at all. Confession: I hit the page button once and looked left as though I had turned an actual page in a book.

2.If you walk away and the kindle goes into its sleep mode with a screen saver, when you come back there can be some residual pixels from the screen saver. I have concerns that over time these electronic smudges may become semi- or altogether permanent. Without further investigation, that’s as much as I would be prepared to say on the subject.

The problems I have are small in comparison to the things that are great about this device. In short, I am in love hook, line, and sinker. That’s not to say there will never be another hardback book purchased and lovingly shelved, but it will have been read digitally first.

Note: I also purchased the plain black amazon case for the Kindle 2. It is MUCH better looking in person. The Kindle clicks into it and it is comfortable to hold. If the right hand side of the kindle not being secured would bug you, order one of those other cases. Maybe the hot pink one ;o)

This makes the TENTH digital format we publish in. WithOUT DRM (encryption).

The possibilities with digital are almost limitless. I find myself shaking my head at how behind some publishers (mainstream, I mean) are concerning digitization of their inventory. LDS lit in all its forms could be on the cutting edge of this, but it seems everywhere I go in the bloggernacle, almost no one even know ebooks exist.

I would love to see all of the current LDS oriented publications put out an ebook/Kindle version. For the Kindle, they are easy to produce, just simple HTML formatting. The biggest drawback is it only has a 4-level grayscale screen, so images don’t look so good.

If anyone has a kindle and wants to see a version of Dialogue formatted for the Kindle, I recently converted the Winter 2007 version for my Kindle. And I am in the process of converting a few of my favorite past issues and articles. Just send me an e-mail: kari at hebers dot us

Like MoJo, I would be willing to help anyone who is interested.

I use MS Word’s track changes feature all the time. It’s a requirement for the kind of work I do, collaboratively with people who live halfway across the country. And believe me, it’s an improvement on what I used before that.

At the same time, I also find that for some kind of editing, printing things out is a must. And for some kinds of reading/writing, doing something to get away from my computer screen is highly desirable. I’ll even print out copies and take them outside, just to get outside for a few minutes.

There are also some kinds of writing that I do best on paper. Especially writing that takes place during Sacrament Meeting, which means a lot of my Mormon fiction and personal writing. But that’s another topic.

I also agree with William, however, that electronic publishing could be a godsend for academic publishing. So often, when I look at published research (something I have to do for my work), I find that a lot of the useful background information was excluded–stuff I’m sure the original researchers created, but that was cut for page count reasons. I’d like access to the full version.

If you get to thinking about this any more seriously, drop me a line.

But at the same time, I enjoy the design element. Attempting to unify textual and visual elements can be a lot of fun.

The ability to create collaborative documents like this is certainly one of the great (and largely untapped) benefits of the Internet-based community now at our disposal.

I tried using Google docs because the collaborative and wiki-style nature of it appeals to me. I could have an editor go in and make changes and suggestions and then compare that version with a previous version (since Google saves copies of each major set of changes). The only problem with that is when I tried to export it into a format for submission, things got a bit messed up.

But I’m hopeful that such software will improve. And then when we see improvements in display technology (or at least more affordable and flexible appliances like the Kindle that are geared towards crisp readibility), then I think it’ll be more pleasant to work solely electronically.

In terms of print-on-demand, I think that we need to start thinking about premium versions as well. Maybe not fine limited editions runs of every journal, but best-of anthologies and auctioning of original artwork and signed copies, etc. I’ll actually be playing around with some of these concepts after the beginning of the year at A Motley Vision.