I have been with my shiny new Kindle Paperwhite since a few days and I am traveling around now, carrying it with me as I type this. And, of course, I have been reading books on it all the while.
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I am a firm believer in reading books I can touch and feel, (and I have voiced that ever so often,) so what made me pour $210 (which is how much a Paperwhite costs where I live) on an e-reader? I intend to address that soon.
I will also take a moment to address a current topic of debate: are e-readers dead? And if so, why — owning a phablet, a tablet, a couple of laptops and a desktop — did I buy a Kindle Paperwhite?
The basics:
My experience, and why nothing other than the Kindle Paperwhite would fit my needs
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Fonts, Book jumping, X Ray and Sharing options.
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For those who are unaware, Amazon’s Kindle comes in about four flavours — or five, depending on how you look at it: a basic non-touchscreen Kindle; an older Kindle Keyboard mostly still available only with retailers carrying leftover pieces, but a good buy nonetheless; the Kindle Paperwhite (further in four types: WiFi+ads, WiFi-ads, WiFi+3G+ads, WiFi+3G-ads each with about a $25 increase in price); and two Kindle Fire tablets running Android and reaching as high as $430 (Rs 26,000). All prices according to where I live; U.S. prices drop by a substantial 25%.
This was by no means my first Amazon purchase, but it has, till date, been my biggest and everything went smoothly and the device was delivered in exactly three days (not including the date I placed the order, which was a sunday).
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Collections are a great way to organise your books.
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My needs were, comme toujours, quite specific: I needed a device which felt as close to paper (and the Paperwhite screen feels too weirdly like it), I needed a device which would not reflect light and obscure text (and the Paperwhite handles that beautifully with virtually no text-hindering glare), I needed a device which did not blast light into my eye like my tablet and phone did every time I used them in a slightly darkened room, thereby causing great fatigue (and the Paperwhite technology lights up the e-ink paper while constraining the light to fall within the device and not jump off the screen).
And suddenly I wished all devices were made this way, only with faster page refreshing.
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Limited settings, but with specificity
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The basic Kindle did not carry a touchscreen, so I did not fancy it as much; the fire etc. were tablets which are pretty useless investments considering I already own a tablet that works great. I just needed an e-reader, no speakers, no audio, no messing up with it (although jailbreaking this is on my list, it is not scheduled anywhere in the visible future), and, lastly, it must feel like a good old book.
The Kindle Paperwhite does. And it does it all very elegantly.
Performance, battery life and memory
Compared to the basic Kindle, the Paperwhite is far superior in terms of resolution (practically, even if not on paper), and speed. E-ink refreshes are swift albeit visible. To give you a better idea, let me say, ”it is faster than IE10″. There!
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The basic Kindle list view is still an alternative to the new book cover view.
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Amazon has brought down the storage space from 4 to 2GB for some reason, but given that the device can still fit close to a thousand books and retrieve an infinite number from the cloud, I surprisingly do not find it restricting.
E-ink refreshing is sped up by only half refreshing the device a each touch and doing a full refresh once every six touches (noticeable by the split-second black page in-between) which means right around the fourth or fifth refreshes, you can begin to notice previous pages onscreen.
Once again, this is just a poor complaint because the see-through effect is not visible unless you look for it; and while reading a book I can hardly think of a reason that would prompt you to go look for ghosting.
At this point I cannot speak authoritatively on battery life except say that it is very impressive when compared to my other devices because I have only ever charged my Paperwhite once and it has lasted all these days.
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Landscape reading mode on the Kindle Paperwhite.
Most notable features
or, here’s all you can do on the Kindle Paperwhite
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Take down notes, make them public.
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Let us start with the basics: the Paperwhite is meant for reading. Indeed the device has attained perfection in creating a reading atmosphere like no other.
Fine-tuning options include six fonts (Baskerville — a form of which this website is set in!), Helvetica (of which I am a big fan and use for headings on this website), Caecillia, Caecillia condensed, Futura and Palatino (which, if you recall, I used in my last photo book.)
Margins and line spacing can both be adjusted in three levels to improve ease of reading.
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Amazon’s experimental browser on Kindle.
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Further, Kindle allows sharing passages/books links via Twitter and Facebook; you can also look up the dictionary of your choice (most are paid, the best are free); and you can add highlights (in grey) and notes to sections of text.
Here is something I particularly like — notes you add can be set to be publicly visible to your contacts; something of the sort that happens in libraries where people make notes along the margins. I never liked soiling the margins, but this feature does bring back those days even before college that I used to carry my library card and spend lots of time in the local library as a kid!
Amazon has also included it ever-experimental web browser. Above, you can see a screenshot of this website as viewed on the Kindle Paperwhite browser. It is satisfactory for extremely quick, minimum browsing once in a while.
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24-step paperwhite screen adjustment.
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Of course you can visit the Kindle Store from within the device and purchase books in one click. You can also attach and send to your Kindle email books and (here’s a neat tip not many will let out) typing in the word convert in the email subject will prompt Amazon to automatically convert and deliver the book to your Kindle freely (on WiFi) or at a price of roughly $1 per MB (on WhisperSync).
After everything, there is that one feature defining the Kindle Paperwhite: the paperwhite screen itself! With four well hidden lights in the bottom, and for more on top, the Paperwhite lights up the screen more naturally than evenly and gives a feeling that the paper is in broad daylight even as the reader sits in a darkened room. The brightness is adjustable in about 24 steps based on ambient lighting, manually, with a slider accessible from almost anywhere on the device.
Concluding remarks
Overall, my Kindle Paperwhite was a worthy investment. If you never read, the Kindle will not magically make you read more; but if you always read and are also environmentally concerned and do not exactly have an infinite pocket to buy all books in the world and are therefore looking to get good books cheap and classics for free, firstly, that makes you the cheapest Kindle reader around — but you are not alone! — and, secondly, the Kindle and specifically the Paperwhite, is one fine device in your arsenal.
If you are on Kindle or Amazon, connect with me. And if you are thinking of buying a Kindle, go ahead, so long as you actively already read close to at least forty-fifty books a year, else the Kindle is too costly a price to justify. All-in-all, avid readers cannot go wrong with a Kindle, more so with the Paperwhite.
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