John Miedema

It is time for me to give an ereader a serious shakedown. In Slow Reading, I asserted that print books are still the superior technology for reading anything of length or substance; that view remains. However, it is clear that the writing and publishing world is changing. I am discovering excellent writers who are publishing their material independently, often as ebooks. I want to read this material, but not on a computer, and without printing it. A specialized reading device might fill the gap.
Amazon’s ereader, the Kindle, came to Canada …

The Case for Books is the title of Robert Darnton’s new book. I am reading the hardcover print edition, my other Christmas gift after a Kindle. The physical casing of books seems in question in the digital age. Will ereaders replace print books? The book too is a technology. A better reading device must both preserve the best features of the print book for long form reading, and then enhance them. In this second post of my Kindle shakedown series, I give my personal take on the Kindle’s hardware and …

The ereader is changing the way we read books, but it has yet to enhance the way we discover titles. I am in the middle of shaking down my new Kindle. The Kindle store only has about 300,000 titles, precious few considering that three times that number of new titles appear annually (Bowker’s, 2003, 2007). I could not find Nabokov’s Lolita, though I credit Amazon’s preparation for the Canadian Kindle release, stocking Giller prize winners such as MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man. Once I found a potential purchase, the online reviews …

I have read about 2500 books. Print books. I have only read 2.5 ebooks on my new Kindle. In this fourth post in my Kindle shakedown series, I consider the Kindle book reading experience. Given my history with print it is not surprising that I maintain a preference for it, but I enjoy reading on the Kindle more than I expected.
A primary reason for getting an ereader was my interest in reading the work of indie writers publishing via ebooks. Like many others, writer Cliff Burns was frustrated with the …

Amazon designed the Kindle to be bookish, with the dimensions of a paperback and a tapering of width to emulate a book’s binding. Does this design work for Kindle newspaper and magazine subscriptions? I was given a Kindle for Christmas, and in this fifth post in my shakedown series, I give my take on reading subscriptions.
Every Saturday I pick up a print copy of Canada’s The Globe and Mail newspaper. Unfortunately, the Globe does not deliver its print edition to my rural address nor is it available internationally. When the …

In this sixth post in my Kindle “shakedown” series, I find that the Kindle shakes and falls when it comes to note-taking.
Reading my first book on the Kindle, I was satisfied with the way it let me highlight text. The functions for entering and editing notes were also acceptable. One immediate limitation I found was that notes must be linked to a particular location in the text. When I wanted to jot down a general note, I improvised by creating a general notes section at the beginning of the text. …

The Apple iPad will not kill the Kindle. In this installment of my Kindle shakedown series, I contend that the ideal ereader should not become a multipurpose device like the forthcoming iPad, or the HP Slate, or whatever comes next. It should instead become a fully dual-purpose device, with two screens dedicated for the two purposes of reading and writing.
Some say the multipurpose iPad will kill the single-purpose Kindle. I disagree. This year I have discovered the joy of single-purpose devices. Most computers are multipurpose devices, designed to do everything …