After our first look and unboxing of the Kindle 2 and our careful examination of the build, screen, and controls on the Kindle 2 in the first part of this review, this second part of our review of the Kindle 2 will focus on reading on the device. It will be followed by a third part that examines the overall performance of the remaining features of the Kindle 2. We've tested shopping in the Kindle store via the Kindle 2, reading multiple books and periodicals on the device, writing via the integrated notes feature, and converting files to a Kindle 2 friendly format. We've even tried out some of the undocumented features and a few of the hacks available online (including one that allows you to download PDFs directly to the Kindle 2 via the experimental web browser and have them converted to a Kindle-friendly version automatically). What we've discovered throughout our tests is a very powerful and useful device that nevertheless may be priced a bit too high for most to consider making the switch away from traditional books and periodicals.

Reading Performance

If you do not like to read books, newspapers, and magazines, you will not like the Kindle 2. I know this sounds obvious, but with the "free" 3G wireless connectivity bundled with the device, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some geeks out there dreaming of an always available internet offered by the Kindle 2, so that they can read all the websites they love, blog on their blogs, email their friends, and chat away online for free from anywhere. The Kindle 2 does have a free and always available internet, but it is severely limited due to the limits of its experimental browser (see Part 3 of this review, coming soon, for more details).

If you do love reading books, magazines, and newspapers, however, you will absolutely love the Kindle 2. When Amazon released their freely available Kindle for iPhone application, a lot of people I know said that they no longer needed a Kindle 2, because they can read all the same books on their iPhone / iPod touch. These people, I doubt, have ever used a device with an e-paper display. It looks like paper. It responds to light like paper. That means, that unlike the glowing screen on the iPhone, it's better for your eyes and you can read more with less eyestrain (provided that you are in appropriate lighting conditions).

Also, the Kindle 2's form factor makes it easy to hold in one hand and in a variety of ways, so that you don't encounter any of the inconveniences of reading from newspapers and books that we've all grown so accustomed to that we're blind to them. You can place the Kindle flat on the table while you are eating your breakfast cereal and easily read it without having to prop it open like you would have to do with a book. All page turns are achieved by a simple click of a button, so there is no need to unfold and refold the newspaper in order to begin reading the next section. You don't have to worry about finding something to shove between pages to save your place or bending the page corner neatly so that it will stick. The Kindle 2 both remembers where you last were reading in any book or periodical when you open it up on the device, and it allows you to quickly add or remove bookmarks of your own to your books by hitting ALT+B.

Figure 1 & Figure 2: Adding a note to an article and seeing the note displayed at the bottom of the screen. Also note the underlined section of text. This is the highlighting feature. Both the highlighted text and the note appear in the My Clippings.txt file.

If you want to underline something in the text or make a note in the margins, you don't have to keep a pen or pencil handy to do so. Instead, you simply navigate to where in the text you want to highlight using the 5-way controller and click to begin highlighting, then move the cursor with the 5-way and click again to end the highlight, or you move the cursor to a spot using the 5-way and simply start typing to add a note to the text. Your bookmarks, highlights, and notes are all saved to a My Clippings.txt file that you can search through and read via the Kindle 2 itself, or which can be downloaded to your computer over the USB connection for later editing. Even better, Amazon backs up your My Clippings.txt file over Whispersync with their servers, so if you read a book and take lots of notes on the book, then remove the book from your Kindle 2, then later decide to re-download it to the Kindle, you will find all your notes, highlights, and bookmarks still intact. If you want to clip an article from the newspaper or a magazine, you don't have to get out scissors and find somewhere to save the article; you simply have to hit Menu and choose Clip This Aritcle to save the article in its entirety to your My Clippings.txt file.

Also, if you happen to run into a word that you've never seen before on the Kindle 2, you simply have to navigate the cursor in front of the word using the 5-way controller for a definition of the word to appear at the bottom of the screen. Hitting the return button will take you to the full page entry on the word in The New Oxford American Dictionary. Hitting the back button then jumps you quickly back to where you were reading. On the off-chance the word doesn't appear in the dictionary, you can simply hit the return button to bring up a search box, then move the 5-way controller to the right a few times to select either a search on Google or on Wikipedia, type in the word and then hit return again to launch the experimental web browser and search whichever of those two sites you chose.

Figure 3 & Figure 4: Previewing the definition of a word in the text and then viewing the full definition in The New Oxford American Dictionary.

Kindle Store

Hitting the Menu button on the Kindle 2 brings up a different menu with slightly different options depending upon what you're currently doing on the Kindle, but in all the menu variations you will see the two same options at the top: either Turn Wireless On / Turn Wireless Off and then Shop in Kindle Store. One of the things that makes the Kindle a very useful e-ink device is the ease with which one can add content to the device. The Kindle Store doesn't have every book ever printed as of yet. In fact it only has somewhere around 265,000 titles available. Up until yesterday, they didn't have J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings available, but now it is, along with The Hobbit and The Children of Hurin (Figure 5 below). But despite the limited selection currently available, that selection is growing, and there is something magical about clicking Buy and not having to wait for the book to ship and arrive at your doorstep. Instead, the book is downloaded and ready to read on the device, normally, in less than a minute and for less than the cost of a physical copy of the book.

Figure 5 & Figure 6: List of J.R.R. Tolkien titles in the Kindle Store and The Lord of the Rings page where you can choose to "Try a Sample" of the book.

Nearly every book available via the Kindle Store has a link to Try a Sample (Figure 6 above) via which you can download the beginning pages of the book to read on the Kindle before committing to the full purchase. All the magazines, newspapers, and blogs available for the Kindle offer a 14-day free trial. When you subscribe to any sort of periodical, you don't have to go to the store to download it daily. After you've purchased the subscription, new issues are sent wirelessly to your Kindle over the 3G Whispernet connection whenever they become available.

Also, of the more than 265,000 titles available, many of them are books that are in the public domain and freely available elsewhere online in formats that can be easily converted to a Kindle-friendly format. Project Gutenberg is one of the most widely known places to find public domain books and they offer many titles in both .txt and .mobi formats, both of which the Kindle 2 can read natively. However, there are several other sites, such as ManyBooks.net, that offer the books in the Kindle's native format.

Many of the criticisms of the Kindle that I've read online complain about how it's a closed platform riddled with DRM, and while that is true of the content available via the Kindle Store, this is in no way different from the Sony Reader Store titles that are sold for Sony's Portable Reader (and only available via a special application that only runs on Microsoft Windows). Sony also made waves recently with the news that Google would be offering its catalogue of nearly 500,000 books for the Sony Reader via Sony's Store. While this is definitely convenient for Sony Reader owners, it is unlikely that Google will fail to make the same books available for online reading, and if they are available online, they can undoubtedly be converted to a Kindle-friendly format. The Kindle 2 supports a wide variety of file formats via which one could fill the Kindle 2's 1.4GBs of free space without ever loading a single DRMed title on it (more on this in the Reading PDFs and personal documents section below). 

Whispernet and Whispersync

The Sprint 3G Whispernet connectivity of the Kindle 2 and the Whispersync functionality that wirelessly transfers titles to your Kindle and quietly backs up your bookmarks, your highlights, your notes, and your last spot read in multiple books is absolutely the killer feature on the Kindle 2. Although the Kindle for iPhone application has the same wireless ability to download books from the Kindle Store and remember what page you last read, it lacks the ability to take notes, to highlight the text, and perhaps most importantly, the ability to subscribe to periodicals. Recently there was a bit of an uproar because one individual's Amazon account was disabled and as a result, he lost access to all the books that he'd purchased on his Kindle that weren't currently loaded on his Kindle.

If you don't happen to live in an area where Sprint connectivity is plentiful, then you will no doubt feel somewhat cheated by the Kindle 2. However, you can still purchase titles via Amazon.com on your computer. Rather than selecting "Send wirelessly to my Kindle" you must choose to download them to your computer. Then connect your Kindle 2 to your computer via USB and transfer the books to your Kindle 2 by copying the files to the Documents folder on the device. You'll also want to regularly backup all the contents of the user accessible parts of your Kindle without the ever-present Whispersync. This definitely deflates some of the magic of the Kindle 2, so make sure you check out the Kindle 2 Whispernet coverage map before you purchase.

Reading periodicals

I used to subscribe to the paper edition of the New York Times until a large amount of their content became freely available, albeit ad-supported, online and I realized that it was simply a lot of wasted paper being delivered to my house daily. I also, inevitably, ended up reading the paper less and less when it was no longer going through the ritual of being delivered daily to my doorstep, begging for my attention. Now, thanks to the Kindle 2, I'm subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and on the weekend I buy the Sunday Times on the device. I also subscribe to The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, and Technology Review. Additionally, I subscribe to Amazon Daily, the only free blog available for the Kindle. Every morning when I wake up, I turn on the wireless connection on my Kindle 2 and the newest issue of the WSJ arrives ready for my reading. On Sundays, I wake up and navigate to the Kindle Store, I select Newspapers, I select The New York Times, and then I choose Buy current issue... and it downloads to my Kindle in less than a minute. Every Monday a new issue of The New Yorker shows up and on Fridays a new issue of the Times Literary Supplement arrives. Amazon Daily, and all the blogs, update throughout the day over the Whispernet connection.

Two important notes about all these periodicals: First, they do not have all the pictures of their paper counterparts (although The New Yorker does have all the comics, which is great), which is a bit disappointing; secondly, they don't have any advertisements in them (except for the Times Literary Supplement, which had one subscription advert in the middle), which is diametrically at odds with the online presence of all these publications and even with their paper counterparts, and I must say, it is wonderful. I find myself reading more and more and focusing on the stories without all the distractions of reading them online.

Also, you can clip any article your reading to your My Clippings.txt file, so it is easy to save an article for later or copy and paste an article from the My Clippings.txt file to email it to a friend who you think should read it when you connect your Kindle 2 to your computer. Although this is a great feature, I find myself wishing that the Kindle 2 had some sort of rudimentary email client so that I could simply choose "email this article to a friend" rather than "Clip this Article," so I could cut out the middleman, my computer.

Figure 7 & Figure 8: Section List view and Article List view

For those of you thinking, but I like to skim through the paper and land randomly on an article, the Kindle 2 does offer several different ways to navigate periodicals that make it not totally unfamiliar, although it does take some getting used to. You can simply click Next Page and Previous Page, but you can also move the 5-way controller to the left or the right to jump ahead to the next article or jump back to the previous article. The periodical normally says "Next article: Title of the article..." just above the small strip that says   and Next Article>. In between these two options is a third option that is accessible by simply clicking down with the 5-way controller: View Sections List.

The sections list lists, as one would expect, all the sections of the periodical with a number next to each section indicating the number of articles in that section. You can use the 5-way control to highlight a section or highlight the number. Clicking on the section name takes you to the first article in that section so that you can begin reading or navigate by page or by article back and forth through the section. Clicking on the number brings up an article list for that section with the title of all the articles in that section and a brief summary of each of the articles. You can use Next Page to view more article summaries should there be more pages of them or to advance to the next section's article list. You can also use the 5-way to jump ahead or back through the article lists of the various sections when in Article List View. Also, don't forget that at any time, you can simply hit the space bar or the return key to pull up a search box to find specifically what you're looking for in the periodical.

There are also on-the-fly visual cues to help you navigate your texts. As you read through articles, you'll notice that there is a thin progress bar across the bottom. Each of the dots on the progress bar indicates another article in the current section and the progress bar indicates your progression through the entire section. Each time you jump to a new section, the progress bar begins again.

Figure 9 & Figure 10: Progress bar and navigation within a periodical and the Menu while reading a book.

Reading books

Reading books on the Kindle 2 takes some slight getting used to, but in what other scenario can you carry around an entire library of books in something that weighs only 10.2 ounces? Sure. there's the other e-book readers on the market, but none of them have the always-on 3G connection to the internet. Thanks to the Whispernet connection on the Kindle 2, there is also a much larger online catalogue of books at your fingertips, both via the Kindle Store and via the multiple online sources of free books in the public domain.

If you're like me, you most likely read a book chapter by chapter, and if, like me, you read before bed, as you start to get tired, you flip ahead through the pages quickly to see how many pages are left in the chapter. This is problematic with the Kindle 2 because there is no concept of page on the device. The progress bar that in periodicals provided you with dots to indicate separate articles and progress for sections is replaced with a much simpler progress bar that simply indicates the overall percentage of the book that you have completed (see Figure 10 above, where in the bottom left corner, grayed out, it notes that I am 61% complete with the book on this page) along with a range of location numbers. Since the text in all books on the Kindle 2 is adjustable in font size, no book has set pages. Pages are replaced with numbers marking locations. So right now, reading C.J. Cherryh's Fortress of Eagles, I am currently 78% in according to the progress bar. The current page, which just so happens to be the beginning of Chapter 3 of Book 3, is listed as displaying Locations 4845-51 and on the far right of the progress bar, the Kindle 2 displays the total number of locations in this book, which is 6182.

Unfortunately, there is no "skip ahead to the next chapter" feature in books like there is with skipping to the next article in periodicals. If there were, I would simply toggle ahead to the next chapter using the 5-way controller, make note of the location numbers, then hit the Back key to jump back to the last page I was on and via some quick subtraction, I would be able to roughly tell how many "pages" remain in the chapter. Instead, I have to either click Next Page multiple times quickly and count the pages and then hit Prev Page multiple times to get back. Alternately, I can open up the menu (Figure 10 above) and access the Table of Contents, choose Book 3, Chapter 4, then make note of the location numbers, hit the back key a couple of times to get back to the last page I was on and then do some quick subtraction. You can also search for words rather easily, so an alternate approach would be to hit the space bar or return key and type in "Chapter 4" as your search term. The search results are displayed with the Location number first, so you simply need to locate the first Chapter 4 that appears with a location number past the location number you were just on and hit the back key. Any of these procedures provide you with the same basic information that you normally would get by flipping ahead a bit to see how many pages were left in a chapter, but they are all much less intuitive, especially in light of how nicely the Kindle 2 handles jumping around and navigating periodicals. 

Also, I have been spoiled somewhat by my first generation Sony Reader, which not only used the more familiar pages metaphor for books (and changed the number of pages depending upon what font size you were using), but also had the ability to quickly jump ahead or back ten pages, by holding down the next page and previous page buttons. The Kindle 2 could definitely use some sort of feature like this; given the way periodical navigation works, it would make sense to add some additional navigation via toggling the 5-way controller.

Despite this minor inconvenience, reading books on the Kindle 2 is in many ways better than reading actual books. For one thing, as I've mentioned before, the Kindle 2 is easier to hold in a larger variety of ways than a normal book. You don't have to fold the book back or use a book-weight to hold the pages flat while reading on a flat surface. Although, just like normal books you need adequate lighting to read on the Kindle, you can easily make the font size bigger to make reading easier in non-ideal lighting situations. These are fundamentally cool things about reading on an e-ink device that it takes you a while to actually realize, but when you do it is sort of an "ah-ha!" moment where you suddenly grasp how useful and neat this is and how it differs greatly from both normal paper and computer screens.

You find yourself reading more and more quickly because there is less stress on your eyes. You can underline the text and add notes from the device itself. You can read a passage that reminds you of another book and download that new book immediately. See Stephen Johnson's recent WSJ article for more on this and to see his "ah-ha" moment with the Kindle: How the E-book Will Change the Way We Read and Write.

Reading PDFs and personal documents

Personal documents on the Kindle 2 are treated just like books in terms of reading. The trick is figuring out the best way to get them onto your Kindle 2.

Amazon offers all Kindle owners an email address to which you can send documents that you want converted for reading on your Kindle. This email address is typically yourusername@kindle.com, but every document you send to this email address for conversion will cost you $0.10. You can instead send the documents to yourusername@free.kindle.com and the documents will be converted for you and then sent back to you so that you can manually copy them to your Kindle's documents folder via a USB connection with your computer. You can only send documents to these conversion emails from email addresses that you have marked as authorized in your Amazon account, so there is no risk of someone guessing your Kindle email and sending you a bunch of unwanted documents that cost you $0.10 a pop. Amazon supports converting the following file formats to Kindle 2 format: PDF, HTML, DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP.

While Amazon can convert PDFs, they call the conversion "experimental" at this point, and you normally end up with text-only conversions that lack images that may have been in the original PDF or have some odd characters or formatting in the text. If you're a really heavy PDF reader and you aren't thrilled by the 3G connectivity of the Kindle 2, you may be better served buying an ebook reader, like the Sony Reader, that natively supports viewing PDFs. However, there are non-Amazon sanctioned ways to get PDFs and all your content onto the Kindle 2.

First, if you have .txt files, you can simply drag them over the USB connection with your Kindle to your Kindle's documents folder and the files will show up as books on the Kindle 2. The same goes for any other document that happens to be in one of the file formats that the Kindle natively supports: Kindle (AZW), TXT, unprotected MOBI, and unprotected PRC. For everything else, there are two other solutions that I recommend and which work quite nicely. 

The first is Calibre, which is a free and open source ebook management system that works with both the Kindle and other various ebook readers. Calibre is very much like an iTunes for ebooks, as it allows you to pull all sorts of documents into its library and both convert them into a Kindle-friendly format and send them directly to your connected Kindle 2 via USB. Calibre is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. The Calibre site notes that it also includes "library management, format conversion, news feeds to ebook conversion, as well as e-book reader sync features and an integrated e-book viewer."

The second thing that I would recommend, but place firmly under multiple "proceed at your own risk" disclaimers is a hack that uses the command line version of Calibre on the Kindle 2 itself to convert all kinds of documents either placed in the documents folder on the Kindle 2 or downloaded via the experimental web browser on the Kindle 2: Savory. Savory is a free hack that one can install on the Kindle 2 (it does not work with first generation Kindles) that monitors the documents folder on the Kindle 2 for new convertible file formats and converts them on the device into formats that the Kindle 2 can understand. There is even a version that provides support for picture-perfect PDF conversion. As far as hacks go, the installation of Savory is pretty straightforward, but it is a hack and should everything go wrong you could be left with a non-functioning Kindle 2.

This second part of our Kindle 2 review has become much longer than expected, so we're going to offer a third part soon which will examine the overall performance of the remaining features and functionality of the Kindle 2, along with our overall product rating. Stay tuned!