Amazon’s Kindle software recently landed in the iTunes app store and so I decided to download it to give it a spin.  So far so good.  Before I give my review of the software, however, let me point out that I’m in no way ready to make the jump into eBooks for three reasons:

1. Right now I’m locked into whatever annotation format Amazon has implemented in the Kindle (and on the iTouch/iPhone software, that’s none at all).  I don’t write in books a lot, but when I do the notes are indespensible and I like have the annotations work the way my brain does – which is weird.
2. I love books.  I love the smell of a book, and the feel of the pages in my hands.  I realize that the future isn’t in physical books – but even Captain Picard had physical volumes and if it’s good enough for Jean Luc it’s good enough for me.
3. DRM.  Jasper Fforde does a brilliant job describing the problems of book DRM in his second novel Lost in a Good Book (read it, really).  The main problem is, I can’t share a book!  Reading is a communal experience for me, eBooks destroy that reality at the moment for the sake of convenience – it’s not a bargain I’m willing to make.

Having said that, there’s some good reasons to switch to eBooks as the technical and philosophical kinks get worked out:

1. The evironment is better served with eBooks, no more pulped up dead trees to support my book habit!
2. Technology will eventually catch up to give people the flexibility in annotations they want, and when it does, we’ll not only be able to make annotations, but make them searchable (no more paging through a book looking for my great comments!).
3. Society will (hopefully) stand up to publishers the way they did for music downloads.  I say “hopefully” because it’s by no means a sure thing, there doesn’t really seem to be a free download culture surrounding books – without that there isn’t much of an impetous to drop DRM.
4. Portability and Convenience are eBook’s killer features.  Today I just downloaded a book and was reading it on my iTouch in about a minute.  Instead of twenty books in my luggage when I travel, in the future I’ll just carry whatever ereader I want to carry.

OK, so enough philosophy, how does Kindle work on the iTouch/iPhone?  Pretty well, actually.  The flexibility of the interface is pretty nice, and even though the iTouch screen isn’t a pretty as digital ink, the fonts look wonderful at every zoom level.  The application is snappy, and page turns are a simple flick of the finger (much the same way that I advance slides in Stage Hand).  Bookmarks are also easy to manage, and Kindle automatically saves your last position when you exit the app.  As it stands right now, I only have two major problems with Kindle on my iTouch:

• They’ve hit the same snage that Olive Tree first hit when they released their app – Apple is paranoid about applications selling content apart from the app store.  Right now to get something for Kindle you have to open up Safari, purchase your book, and then open up Kindle to let it sync.  In a word tedious.  Olive Tree eventually got around this, I hope that Amazon gets over this hump as well.  Otherwise, this would not be a way I’d like to purchase books.
• At the default text zoom, you really don’t get a lot of text on the screen at a time.  This is just a limitation of the environment, I know – but if you want to go back 5 or 6 paragraphs those flicks can add up.

What book did I get?  Well, given that I like to write on Ministry and Technology I decided to pick up Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith by Shane Hipps.  My friend Chris said that Shane was working on many of the same projects that I’ve been dealing with – so it seemed like an appropriate choice.  While it’s not my first choice for reading a book, the kindle edition saved me about $4 + shipping charges.  I can get into that.