Amazon Kindle International review

After its high-profile launch in the US, we’ve been forced to wait two years for the Amazon Kindle to land on these shores. With Christmas looming, its rivals growing bolder and a UK Kindle no nearer to making an appearance, Amazon has decided to simply ship us the US model instead, complete with its two-prong charger and free 3G connection to the US Kindle Store, ensuring any books you buy will have plenty of Zs in them.

Given these shortcuts, it’s not surprising the Kindle doesn’t meet our lofty expectations, but it is disappointing just how unaccommodating Amazon has been to its international customers. This is most evident in the Kindle Book store, which should be the beating heart of Amazon’s assault on the UK eBook market, instead of its slightly dicky hip.

Accessed through the device, the online store offers the ability to subscribe to international magazines and newspapers, including The Times, Telegraph, Daily Mail and Independent, and to search for books in a dozen genres. Being able to buy a book in bed, or on the train, and be reading it 60 seconds later is a brilliant concept, but the store is beset by so many problems it tarnishes the Kindle more than it embellishes it.

The most significant shortcoming is the selection of titles on offer. Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel is in there, but no Peter Carey, Philip Roth, Iain Banks or Cormac McCarthy. That’s not to mention sales heavyweights such as Stephen King, Dan Brown (for better or worse) and even JK Rowling – in fact, just five of September’s top ten UK bestsellers were in the Kindle store.

To offer a glimpse of what you can expect from the store, the best match returned by a search for Stephen King’s IT was a novel entitled “Diary of a U-boat Commander” by Stephen, Sir King-Hall – a riveting read, we’re sure, though one with nary a deranged clown in sight. The fact that any books you do manage to find could be 40% more expensive than they would be in the US is an added insult after the £202 cost of the device itself.

This wouldn’t be so bad if Kindle owners were besieged with alternatives, but that’s not the case. Echoing Apple’s iTunes lock-in, the Kindle uses Amazon’s proprietary AZW format, which is supported by only one retailer: the Kindle Book Store. In contrast, the majority of the UK’s major book chains, including Borders and Waterstones, offer their eBooks in the ePub format not supported by the Kindle. On the bright side, Amazon’s finest does support Mobipocket and TXT files, at least allowing you to download classics and free eBooks from Project Gutenberg and its ilk.

You can also crowbar PDFs, DOCs and RTFs onto the device by emailing them to the Kindle email address supplied when you register. Amazon then converts these documents into AZW files which can either be emailed back to you and loaded manually using a USB cable, or sent wirelessly to the Kindle at a cost of 99 cents per megabyte. The process takes around ten minutes, and Amazon warns that PDFs may not render properly, although we’ve not experienced any problems in our tests.

Update 25/11/09 – Amazon has now added native PDF support to the Kindle, meaning you no longer need to converts PDF documents to AZW to use them. However, the Kindle’s PDF reader doesn’t support annotations, text-to-speech, panning or zooming. The latter is of particular concern given that many PDFs tend to feature tiny text, making them unreadable without the ability to zoom in

None of this exactly endears us to the service. Loading your own documents onto an eBook reader should never be this convoluted, and we refuse to applaud Amazon for introducing an aggravating extra step to a process other devices consider to be simple and essential.

These flaws are made all the more infuriating because the Kindle’s hardware is so staggeringly good we’d marry it on the spot if this was Alabama. The keyboard offers a handy way to search and add notes to books, and the little joystick can be used to highlight text, navigate menus and bring up definitions of words from the inbuilt Oxford American Dictionary.

We’re particularly amused by the controversial text-to-speech feature, which veers from being mildly useful one minute, to doing impressions of HAL having a heart attack the next. Quite what the Author’s Guild objected to is beyond us – it can’t even correctly pronounce the word Kindle.

More relevant is the 1.4GB of usable storage and a 532Mhz ARM processor that ensures the Kindle moves faster than a cheetah being shot out of a cannon, though it tends to get bogged down when dealing with image-heavy PDFs.

However, the pick of the technological litter is undoubtedly the 6in E Ink screen, which renders in 16 shades of grey, rather than the eight of the Sony. It’s hard to explain the difference this makes without seeing it in action, but it softens and deepens the picture immeasurably, offering the reading equivalent of wrapping your eyes in silk while having your corneas caressed by Scarlett Johansson. Almost.

Ironically, the screen’s ample charms would have been most apparent when displaying pictures in newspapers and magazines, but unfortunately the Kindle won’t actually download these because we live outside of the US.

Amazon informed us this was to keep the price of subscriptions down, but we suspect it has more to do with the company avoiding excessive data charges until it can sign a deal with a UK network provider. This would certainly explain why we can’t access the inbuilt web browser, unlike our US cousins. Either way, it hobbles a huge part of the Kindle’s potential.

Which sums up our feelings towards the Kindle as a whole. Where the Sony Reader Touch is a device whose ambition had been thwarted by the hardware on which it relies, the Kindle is a device whose brilliant hardware has been short-changed by Amazon’s thwarted ambition.

Had the store offered a wider selection of titles, or the device not been so totally dependent on it, we’d have given the Kindle a Performance rating right up there with that of its Features & design. As it stands, we find ourselves waiting on Amazon once again, and we can only hope it doesn’t take another two years to iron out the problems.

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