So I ordered myself an Amazon Kindle book reader some while back, and it arrived in the mail yesterday. Here are some scattered impressions, in no particular order.

The pictures of the Kindle on the Amazon website do not do the unit justice. They make it look like a big white chunk of cheap plastic; it’s much more attractive and pleasant to hold than I would have guessed. It’s still not entirely lovely; I’m reminded of the first generation iPods.

The screen is surprisingly pleasant to look at. It uses something called “electric paper”; power is consumed only when the page is updated. It’s a reflective screen, like the page of a normal book, which is a good thing, on the whole. You need to sit where there’s light for reading, which is no problem, and you can actually read it outdoors, even in bright sunlight. At least, so I’m given to understand–that part I’ve not had the opportunity to try for myself. I could wish for a little more contrast between the text and the background, but on the whole the display is very nice.

There’s an annoying flash when you go to the next page; it’s as though the foreground and the background inverts for a moment. And turning the page takes a noticeable amount of time. The flash and the lag bothered me a lot at first, but I find that I’ve almost stopped noticing it, any more than I notice the paper moving or the time it takes to turn a page in a real book.

There are a number of interactive features, including (of course) the ability to buy e-books from Amazon, and to manage the content on the Kindle itself. The interface is better than I’d feared, and not as good as it could be, but it’s usable. The big issue is the speed of screen updates, which are too slow for fancy interactive graphics. There’s no notion of a mouse pointer; instead, there’s a strip of (I assume) LCD along the right-hand side of the display; a little scroll wheel moves a silver rectangle called the cursor up and down it. This allows you to select individual lines or menu items in the display. It’s limited, but they’ve made surprisingly good use of it. A neat feature is that the height of the cursor grows and shrinks to match the size of the thing being selected.

The slowness of the screen updates works in the Kindle’s favor in at least one respect. Scrolling the text simply won’t work; it would be way too slow. Consequently, the text is presented in pages, and you step forward and backward by page. This makes reading a book on the Kindle much more like reading a real book, and more pleasant than reading e-books in a web browser. This is enhanced by the position of the Next Page/Previous Page buttons on the sides of the units, as the pages seem to move from right to left as you read the book, rather than from top to bottom.

That said, it’s a little too easy to press the Next Page/Previous Page buttons when handling the unit. (Everybody says this, I gather.)

The wireless capabilities work as advertised. I bought a couple of books from the Amazon Kindle store, and they were downloaded to the Kindle in next to no time over “WhisperNet”, which is a data network running on Sprint’s EVDO cell phone network. Every Kindle has its own e-mail address; you can e-mail documents in a variety of formats to that address, and Amazon will convert them automatically to Kindle format and send them to your Kindle. I tried this with a Word document and an HTML document; both showed up on the Kindle without further ado. I also downloaded a Project Gutenberg text of Dicken’s Bleak House in Kindle format from ManyBooks.net and copied it to the Kindle from my laptop using the supplied USB cable. That also worked flawlessly.

You can highlight passages in any book you’re reading, which works fairly well so long as you remember that you’re highlighting lines, not phrases. You can also add short annotations using the Kindle’s built-in keyboard, which is a QWERTY keyboard designed for two-thumb typing, rather like a Blackberry or various smartphones. It’s not quick (for me, at least) but it works.

The unit comes with an attractive leather “book cover” which protects the screen; I’d have no qualms tossing the Kindle into a bag or backpack provided that I used the cover. The cover also makes the Kindle easier to hold when you’re reading. On the other hand, it makes it hard to do the two-thumb typing thing.

The software includes a simple web browser, suitable for browsing “mobile” web content; it’s slow, thanks mostly to the screen update rate…but on the other hand, it’s really easy to search Wikipedia anywhere you’ve got a cellphone signal. Way cool. It also has a built-in dictionary. You can click on any line in a book, and it will present you with definitions for the significant words on the line.

On the whole, I’m favorably impressed. There’s room for improvement in both the hardware and the software, but on the whole the unit is the nicest environment for reading e-books I’ve yet come across.