I never needed tech support for a book

My three-week love affair with the Amazon Kindle 2 eBook reader ended when it slipped off a couch and gently fell 20 inches to a carpeted floor. The display was corrupted by this fall. The upper 20% of the screen was a useless jumble. The lower 80% had a dark grey cast and vertical lines that marred its appearance and readability. (See Kindle 2 - The screen breaks.) Amazon sent me a replacement unit without complaint. The replacement Kindle 2 was overnighted and arrived the next afternoon. The original Kindle 2 with the corrupted screen was delivered to a UPS store to make its way back to Amazon. 

The new one needed to be charged and registered with Amazon. Charging took an hour or two. Registration was relatively quick and painless. Then the “fun” began.

The broken Kindle 2 had the following items on it:

• two purchased books
• an issue of Atlantic that I had purchased for $1.49
• sample chapters of books I was considering buying and had downloaded
• several audio books I had uploaded
• some PDFs I had converted to MOBI format, the Kindle’s eBook file format, and uploaded to the device.

The new Kindle’s contents were sparse. The two purchased books showed as archived items. This means that Amazon is keeping a copy available on their servers to download when you want. None of my other items appeared. Adding to my frustration, the two purchased books would not download.

After two calls to technical support and waiting several hours, the purchased books showed up on the Kindle. The issue of the Atlantic was more difficult. Amazon issued a credit for the original purchase and now I can re-buy the magazine. Amazon’s support personnel were easy to reach, pleasant and extremely helpful.

The rest of the original Kindle 2’s content is gone. If I want it back on the new Kindle 2, I will need to replace it myself. This means finding the content, registering the device with the various software applications and then synchronizing the device. I probably will not try.

Ironically, I was able to read my purchased books on my iPod Touch 2G even while the Kindle 2 was useless. This is a far better experience than I imagined. Reading fiction on the small Touch screen is surprisingly easy and pleasant. However, non-fiction suffers from the small screen. Diagrams and illustrations are often too small to read.

The Kindle 2 is an expensive way to read. Navigating books is unwieldy other than page forward or backward. Screen changes can be sluggish. Battery life is awful when the wireless is on. This could be fixed if we could schedule wireless connectivity so that it turned the wireless on/off on a user created schedule. Currently this is a manual exercise only. Most importantly, the device is too fragile.

The corrupted screen is an indication that this device is not as rugged or dependable as the books it intends to replace. In my 50+ years of reading, I never needed technical support for a book. Sure, librarians have helped me locate books but not fix them so that I could read them.

My opinion is that eBook readers are still not ready for primetime. Borrowing or buying books and storing them is not as convenient. However, reading a real book is a much better experience.