251. Scientist’s gadgets: Kindle 2 vs. Palm
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Amazon has recently (announced in New York on this Monday) released Kindle 2. It is currently only available for preorder, but I still want to review it – I am a kind of familiar with the subject of ebook readers, as you will see 
My story begins about 5 years ago. At that time I was a postdoc at CITA, and the postdoc salary was so generous that it was somewhat unclear where actually to spend all that money 
(By the way, I think, CITA remains the institution offering the best postdoc salary in Canada – even Perimeter Institute is one step behind.)
After somewhat extensive thinking I have decided to buy the Palm Tungsten T3 – personal information manager or, as they say, a handheld. The main reason why I wanted a PalmOS device (and not, say, a Windows Mobile device) was the open architecture of PalmOS – by 2001, thousands of custom built applications existed for the Palm platform. The second main reason was – with Palm, I could read e-books, PDFs, txt files etc. etc. on the fly.
Although Tungsten T3 was costly, I never regretted that purchase. The thing turned out to be reliable (in fact, it is still with me, it works fine after 8 years of rather extensive use). I have read thousands of e-books and papers from arxiv.org on my Palm.
The down side was always the battery life. After 5 hours of reading I had to run away to find a cradle (so no extensive reading on Transatlantic flights ) On the other hand, all these numerous applications written for Palm OS were tested and almost immediately forgotten being mostly useless, often unusable. The only two things that I considered worth keeping in the memory of my Palm device were a) iSilo – the document reader for e-books, txt and html files and b) PalmPDF – PDF reader, both freeware.
Around 2005 it became rather clear that Palm platform is going to hell. First, Palm, Inc. split into several companies. Next, they’ve dropped support for the new forthcoming version of the PalmOS in favour of Windows Mobile. Since my T3 grew old and eventually had to die (and I’ve got seriously addicted to e-book reading), I had to find some alternative to my T3.
Handhelds were slowly leaving the market all together, most of their functionality to become supported by mobile phones. But I was really interested only in e-book reading, remember? and all these mobile phones had so tiny displays, that e-book reading on them was truly a pain
I a kind of finally saw an alternative when Amazon has released their first Kindle device. There were several important bonuses compared to my T3:
a) since Kindle display was based on E-ink (not TFT matrix typical for handhelds), it supported reading for several days without recharging. (Physically, the reason why the battery life is so much longer for Kindle compared to Palm is that Kindle only drains battery when you turn the pages, not when a page is displayed and you are reading it.)
b) Kindle display was twice as large as T3’s. (b) was really making Kindle a device convenient for reading.
But… I did not buy the device at that time. Why? There was an important drawback – the only way you could put an e-book into the memory of the device was through the Amazon store. Although prices for Kindle versions of books were extremely competitive, was I supposed to pay to Amazon all my life? to become Amazon’s slave? Also, I did not have an access to my (huge) collection of e-books and PDFs from Kindle – Kindle had a close architecture.
So, now I am coming to the final part of the story As I’ve said in the introduction, Amazon has just released the second version of Kindle.
From my point of view, it is much better than the Kindle 1 device (remember that I don’t like to exaggerate). Why?
- The memory is extended, you can now have 1500 books – the whole your library – with you.
- The battery life is increased, Kindle 2 works for several weeks without recharging if you turn WiFi off (and several days – 4, I believe – if you keep it on).
- It now supports text-to-speech (sic!) – the device can read your book to you out loud
- It has free wireless access to Wikipedia (!!!!)
Take a look at the device yourselves:
Now, let me go to the part where Kindle the First did not shine. First of all, the main option to access books is still through the Amazon store – that is, you buy the book and then download it into Kindle memory either by WiFi (note that you don’t pay for WiFi connection – Amazon itself always pays for it whatever your wireless provider is) or by downloading from the Amazon store to your computer and then connecting your Kindle device to the computer via USB.
However, there is a new option that seems to solve all my problems with Kindle 1. Namely, now you can put all your personal documents to Kindle – whether they are in PDF or TXT format. It works as follows. You either
a) send your document to a given Amazon email address, where the document gets converted into Kindle format and is then sent back to you via WiFi. You pay about 10 cents per document in this case.
b) If you want, you don’t need to pay even those 10 cents! You again send the document to the given email address (“your_name”@free.kindle.com), it gets converted and sent back to you also via email. Then, you transfer it from your computer to Kindle via USB.
So, suppose you have an extensive collection of ebooks and files in DJVU and PDF format like I do. Let me teach you how to get it on Kindle 2
- In the case you want to access DJVU book (if you have PDF, just skip this step) – convert it to PDF first by printing it to the virtual PDF printer (PDF-Xchange 3.0, I think, is free nowadays, or at least you can get a trial).
- Send the produced PDF file to “your_name”@free.kindle.com and get converted Kindle file back.
- Transfer the converted Kindle file from your computer to Kindle via USB.
Sorry for using this lexicon, but it sounds like a no-braner for me, except there could be two caveats. First, DJVU converted into PDF will be huge in size (DJVU are basically nicely compressed image files), so one will really have to separate the book into several files (about 10-30 Mb in size – that’s probably the maximal attachment size your mail provider supports). Second, what we are really interested in are PDF articles from arxiv.org (aren’t we? ) I have a strong suspicion that a really complicated PDF file (with formulae etc.) will not be converted well into the Kindle native format by the Amazon converter. This has to be checked out, but even in the case this is true there is a solution around – converting text PDF files into picture PDF files and then converting them into native Kindle format.
Anyway, taking all these considerations into account, I think, the Palm era has finally ended for me
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Hi Dmitri,
I have been looking into e-book readers too, but the whole conversion business of pdf files for the Kindle is rather off-putting (arxiv-article will look bad). However, I found this reader
http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/iliad
which supports native pdf files, it has an electronic inc. 8 inch screen (768 x 1024, higher than kindles, which can be used in landscape format),one can insert flash cards to have more memory, it has wireless, usb and it weights around a pound. The only drawback I see is a slightly higher price, but I am tempted.
Cheers,
Thorsten
Dear Thorsten,
thanks for the link!
Then, this is decisive factor, too bad for them. Did you check out the first or the second Kindle? (maybe, by a chance they improved conversion script for the second one, but I hardly believe it).
Cheers,
Dmitry.
Hi Dmitry: did you hear anything about other readers? I think Sony has one out.
I have resisted so far the obvious temptation because it is a new technology, so the next generation is likely to be much superior and cheaper. I also don’t like being enslaved to one format, which is one of the reasons I’ve been resisting the temptation of Apple all these years (now that’s going to start a flame war!).
Hi Moshe
When I’ve visited Munich, absolutely everybody in the Mukhanov’s group there was sick with a Chinese device (I forgot the name of the company, but I can ask Winitzki). The device had the same kind of problem that Kindle has – it did not support complicated PDFs. It did support simple PDFs ,ebooks, DJVUs, txt and html files, though, and one could put them on the memory stick which was also supported.
I will have to check out Sony.
Dmitry.
Not sure what happened to my previous comment, besides a lot of redundant things, I was asking for your opinion on other readers, like the one made by Sony.
That’s because I turned premoderation on – your comment was in queue for moderation
I turned it off for now – it is indeed a kind of painful for commentators, let us see how good is my antispam system 
Cheers,
Dmitry.
I just had a bad experience with Amazon’s PDF-to-Kindle converter. The output was really horrifyingly unreadable. Fortunately, I have the LaTeX source from which the PDF was generated, and it looks like I may be able to get a decent result by going through HTML as an intermediary step. I definitely wouldn’t trust their converter with something from the arXiv, though.
Hi Blake,
yes, I already understood that they did not fix the converter… that’s the major no go for the device. Too bad for them (especially stupid since it is not that hard to write a nice converter).
On the positive hand, the iLiad device that Thorsten mentioned seems more and more attractable to me (it even supports writing and marking on e-ink paper).
Cheers,
Dmitry.