Who is hatin' on the Kindle? Me.

Actually, none of this is Kindle specific. It just gets singled out as the most successful ebook reader.

So, what's wrong with ebook readers?

1. Electronic ink isn't here yet. It's damn good. The first time I saw an e-ink reader, I thought I was seeing a fake screen display. Discovering it was a live display was mind blowing. Essentially zero power. It's not quite as easy to read as paper, but it's so close that I'm okay with it. It's not color, but color is overrated. Only the minority of my wall of books are color inside. So that's fine. But the flicker, egad is that bad. Every electronic ink screen requires a full screen wipe, black, then white, to change its display. Failure to do so leads to ghost images being left being. The wipe is jarring, and relatively slow. The best defense I've heard is "you get used to it" and "you learn to plan ahead." That's not evidence that e-ink is ready. Those are coping mechanisms for something that isn't ready. And it's not good enough if I need to pop back to re-read the start of a sentence. (The color and wipe problems are solved by other display types, but those types chew up power and don't read as well as paper. e-ink is the most promising option right now.) I believe this will be fixed, but we're not there yet.

2. DRM. Sure, I limit myself to DRM-free works, but where am I getting my mass market books legally? If I'm stuck with only a subset of published works, ebooks clearly aren't ready. If I want mass market works, I'm buying DRM encumbered works. Many books cannot be borrowed from the library because of publisher restrictions. I'm not aware of any book DRM system that lets me loan a book to a friend without loaning my entire library. I'm not aware of any book DRM system that lets me sell a book I no longer want. I'm unlikely to be able to will my "library" to someone else. If an ebook provider goes under, I may lose access to chunks of bought and paid for library. If I jump from ebook reader to ebook reader, I'm going to lose access to some of my purchased works. Maybe book publishers will get the hell over it, like music publishers got over DRM on music, but we're not there yet. (Props to Baen for already being here. Everything they sell (and give away!) is DRM free.)

ebook readers are the future. I look forward to it. But the future isn't ready yet. Kindle buyers are early adopters, and early adopters occasionally get burned. Call me when this isn't such a mess, and I'll be first in line to buy an ebook reader. Maybe even the Kindle 8.

Added February 12, 2009:

The Ars Technica article on ebooks rang very true to me.

While I still hold that current e-ink technology requires a number of crappy coping mechanisms, the reality is that if we can solve the content/DRM issue, I'd probably learn to cope for the benefits. On the up side, looking at the video demonstration of the Kindle 2 it looks like the page change speed is actually fast enough from me, but the flash remains really annoying. So, progress is being made.

Also, being able to use my Palm or iPhone makes a compelling argument. Neither has the battery life, but both have good enough displays and I'm already carrying them around. Having my library, or at least a big chunk of it, always available would be a huge win.

Finally, something I forgot: publishers need to get past exact page layouts for text-heavy books. If I'm going to read the exact same ebook on my iPhone, my Palm, my laptop, and the Kindle, it needs to flow differently for each platform. In particular, this means PDFs and anything else with a page oriented model is full of fail. I've read PDFs on my Palm (props to the most excellent PalmPDF), and the experience is painful. Smaller screens require narrower columns and need to give up on floating images beside text. Fixed width not only causes problems for small screens by being too wide; it can also be too small, reducing the text per screen in a clumsy and inevitably failed attempt at beauty. I need to be able to adjust the text size, trading off between eyestrain and text-per-screen. Multiple columns are a terrible idea unless I can see the entire column; anything that makes me scroll upwards to see later text fails instantly. Go simple. HTML with CSS is plenty good enough, and portable to boot.

(I replaced "eink" with "e-ink" to be more clear.)

(2009-03-04: Fixed link to Ars Technica)