Rekindling a Love of Reading

The Amazon Kindle is fairly boring by modern computational standards. It's an 8"x5" tablet with a monochrome screen and primitive QWERTY keyboard. What's it used for? Reading. That's about it.

Why would you want to buy a dedicated device just for reading? Good question. Let me reverse the question. Why wouldn't you want to use a general-purpose computer for reading? (hint: it's all in the screen)

A modern computer uses an LCD screen. LCD screens work by refreshing 60-120 times per second, which makes them useful for displaying video and smooth animations (the human eye requires at least 24 frames per second to create the illusion of motion). The catch is that this constant flickering causes eye strain. You know the kind. Head-splitting, migrane-inducing, wanton destruction of brain cells.

What about the Kindle screen? It's most certainly not an LCD screen, as the agnoizingly slow 4 frame per second refresh speed would suggest (first-person shooters, anybody?). Color isn't a selling point either, as it can only handle 16 different shades of gray (even the cheapest of LCDs can display 16,700,000 colors). Indeed. So what's special about the screen?

There are a couple of interesting points to make. First, the technology behind the Kindle's screen, known as e-Ink, consists of tiny charged black-and-white particles. Power is only required when particles are moved to the front or back of the screen, not to hold them there. Consequently, you only draw power when turning pages, not when reading a page. This means that a Kindle has an astonishing battery life--up to 2 months in the case of the Kindle 3.

Second, a corollary of the way pages are displayed is the effect it has on the eyes. When you're reading a page, the screen is static--it isn't being refreshed (flickering) at all. Consequently, it induces almost the same level of eyestrain as a printed page, which is to say, not a lot.

Do I love my Kindle? Yes I do. I've already downloaded a bevy of free classics from the Amazon Kindle store, as well as some technical books that would easily weigh 5 pounds apiece. My gut instinct isn't to pick up light readling like "A Tale of Two Cities" or "Uncle Tom's Cabin", but when said literature is a 30 second download away, why not?

Oh, and did I mention that the 3G version of the Kindle comes with free Internet access? No, I probably shouldn't have. It'll wreak havok with your literary escapades. On second thought, forget I said anything at all.

Until next time,
- Daniel