My Trip Kindle on the road
| Review: Is the Kindle any use for travellers? |
David Whitley, armed with his brand new toy, takes to the road to see whether the Kindle is any good for travellers
Kindle advantages
As I sat down on the bus, heading towards Old San Juan, I suddenly thought about the Rum Diary. Hunter S Thompson’s book – now made into a film starring Johnny Depp – is set in the Puerto Rican capital. It’d be great to read it whilst I’m on the island. A couple of minutes later, as the bus spluttered in the traffic, I was reading it.
For all the advantages that the Kindle – Amazon’s electronic book thingy – has over old fashioned books, the ability to get pretty much any book you want almost instantaneously is surely the king. You turn the 3G wireless on without charge wherever there’s a mobile phone reception, you search for the book in the ‘store’, you click ‘buy’, the money comes off your pre-registered credit card and the book starts downloading.
Other advantages are pretty meaty too. It’s about the same size as an average paperback book, but weighs less. But you can fit hundreds – if not thousands – of books on it. Essentially, you carry a library around with you and there’s no need to ditch a book once you’ve finished it. Think of it as like an iPod (other MP3 players are available) for readers, albeit with a far better battery life.
It’s also possible to get some serious bargains. Many old classics are available for free, whilst I got the complete works of Charles Dickens for 99 pence.
Kindle challenges
I’m old-fashioned though. I like the feel of a proper book. And I spend enough time staring at screens – I don’t want an added headache from staring at more. How does the Kindle deal with such issues? Well you certainly need to get a cover – it’s a little too small to hold comfortably otherwise – but the reading experience is surprisingly good. The screen isn’t backlit (it’s some sort of voodoo magic ‘E-Ink’) which means there’s not the glare problem, and also means you can use it in the sunshine without the screen turning into one big party of unintelligible light. You get used to pressing a button to flick through rather than turning a page surprisingly quickly, while you can choose what size you want the text. This does away with the concept of pages somewhat.
For many reasons, a Kindle makes an awful lot of sense for travellers. But security is an issue. Would you really want to leave a Kindle in your bag on the beach while you go for a swim? Depends on the beach for me – but it’s the same dilemma with a camera or mobile phone.
Travel guide books on Kindle
In theory, then, you should be able to do away with dead tree books completely and just use the Kindle. After all, most of the big guide book brands release their books in Kindle format now. Why buy the print version?
Well, here’s where the limitations of the Kindle start to emerge. You don’t just read guide books, you use them. Most books, you just read page after page. With guide books you don’t read them in order. You’re often flicking through, dipping in and out, reading about the hotel and then looking where it is on the map. With a physical book this is fine – you usually have one bookmark or finger where the map is, and one where the information you require is.
You can also power-flick through the pages – it only requires a very quick glance to see which the right page is. You can get to the right section or index surprisingly quickly.
With the Kindle, it takes four button presses to get to the Table of Contents. It takes a minimum of nine button presses to get to any electronic bookmarks you may have left – and far more unless you get into the habit of deleting bookmarks as you go along.
The maps are next to useless on a Kindle too. You can only zoom in to the size of the screen, with most of the maps being nearly full-sized anyway. At least Rough Guides is honest about this – at the start of its Kindle editions it recommends getting a map from elsewhere. Lonely Planet has a different approach – it shows the full map, then zoomed-in versions of parts of the same map. It means you can see it, but it’s unbelievably annoying to flick through – in the Florida guide, I had to go through eight ‘pages’ of the same map before getting to the next bit of information.
It’s also not possible to mark things on the map like you would do a paper version. You can make ‘notes’ – essentially electronic annotations – wherever you want in the text, but the maps come as one big image file and you can’t mark any specific part of the image.
Navigation problems
Navigation is also poor. You can’t just quickly go to the Miami restaurant section – you have to use the Table of Contents to go to the Miami section, then repeatedly press buttons until you eventually arrive at the restaurants. You can try searching by phrase – ie putting ‘restaurants Miami’ in. But that will only find instances of the exact phrase rather than the actual section you need.
The guide book companies need to invest time in putting more cross-referencing links in. Each restaurant or hotel or attraction should have a ‘view on map’ link that takes you straight to the map.
But the navigation problems are also partly down to the Kindle itself. What it is desperately missing is some sort of mouse, trackball or scrolling wheel similar to that on the iPod. Essentially, a device that allows you to properly flick through pages quickly, rather than pressing a button, waiting for the screen to load (it is quick, but not instantaneous) then pressing the button again.
For just reading, the Kindle is unquestionably a good investment for travellers. For using, it’s not right yet – and it might not ever be. Sure, have a back-up guide book on there (ie. get the print version of a Florida guide and Kindle version of a Miami guide) but it’s not time to ditch the heavy paper bricks just yet.
Reviewed using the Rough Guide to the USA, Lonely Planet Florida, Lonely Planet Austria and Frommer’s Hong Kong.
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Comments
On our Pacific Coast Highway Travel website, I have made our guide to PCH Hotels available for the Kindle, as it's slightly different - an alphabetical/geographical listing of hotel recommendations. It sells as many on the Kindle as it does of the print and ebook versions. But a full-blown guidebook? Mo - not yet, anyway.
I have yet to use my Kindle (officially, I don't get it till Christmas) but ref the guide books ... as I'm sure you know, if you buy the electronic version from Lonely Planet, you can just get the bits you're interested in, rather than the whole schermuley.
I have some for our upcoming trip in .pdf format, which I can read on my Netbook ... but are they also available in Kindle format? Or, can I read .pdfs on a Kindle anyway?
(Check my blog around May to see how I found travelling with it!)
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