Barring text hyphenation, I beg of thee, Jeff Bezos please give Kindles the option to left-justify text. All I want is even spacing between my words.

Better than a Book or an iPad

This review may thus-far seem like mostly complaints, but don’t get me wrong: my Kindle Paperwhite is better than a book or an iPad.

The worst thing about reading on my iPad is that I’m reading on my iPad. Email and Twitter are just a double-home-button press away. As the Internet has become more the center of my life it’s increasingly difficult not to check in on it. One of the Kindle’s biggest advantages is its inability to get on the Internet in a remotely usable way.

“So what,” you say. “Books haven’t been able to get on the Internet since 1440”. True, but books from the library are disgusting objects filled with germs and stains of uncontemplatable origins. Newly bought store books are better (minus the expense) but still heavy, awkward to hold at the beginning and the end, and are completely unsearchable. Which brings us to the next section:

Touchscreen: The Highlight of a Workflow

The vast majority of books I read are non-fiction and many of these are read not for pleasure but as research for my videos. As such, being able to highlight books and reference those highlights later is a must.

Though I’m heavily invested in Apple’s ecosystem, I don’t use iBooks because of their limited highlights. While iBooks does allow you to highlight text it’s nearly impossible to get those highlights out in a useful way, to say nothing of simply trying to look at them on a laptop.

Amazon, however, is nothing if not omnipresent and has Kindle readers for the iPhone, iPad and most importantly, desktop computers. When I’m working on a video I can easily pull up a related book on my Laptop and see the highlights I’ve made.

I can even go to the Kindle website and copy the highlights into Evernote. Awesome.

The Paperwhite’s touch screen is good enough that it makes typing out notes attached to highlights a possibility – something I wouldn’t ever consider doing with the D-pad Kindle, even though it was theoretically possible.

But the touch screen does come with a big cost over the D-pad…

Click!

Lets imagine you’re reading a book. What’s the thing you’re going to do the most? That’s right: turn the page.

Now imagine that you’re in charge of making the world’s best ebook reader. What experience should you make the most pleasant? That’s right: page turning.

One of the best features of the D-pad Kindle was the dedicated page-turn buttons on the side of the device. They weren’t great buttons, but an adequate physical button for a frequently used task is 1,000 times better than the best touch-screen function could ever be.

Removing the buttons from the Kindle Paperwhite is a baffling decision. Page-turn buttons never made accidental pages and resting a thumb on the button, waiting to turn the page was simple and mindless.

As lazy as this sounds, a swipe or tap is a tiny distraction for every page turn. Gestures also make using the device one-handed just a bit more difficult.