Why I'm sending back my Kindle even though I like it

The much-awaited Kindle arrived last night. Today, I'm sending it back. For those of you who wanted a review from me, here it is.

First thing - this is a lovely piece of kit. It looks and feels good. It is So light. Were I keeping it, I would buy a case to protect it, which would double the weight - and it would still be very light.

It's also very easy to use. I'm not techie-minded, but very quickly found my way around. I downloaded a (free) book to check it out. I downloaded sample book chapters. I connected it to my PC and dragged a pdf over. All very simple and quick. Reading on it is fine – the page-turn is very quick, and the buttons easy to find. Once I got the hang of the Menu and Home buttons, navigation was simple.

The Internet interface, which they do mark as 'experimental' is slow and clunky. That is to be expected - I was buying it as a reader, not a surfing device. I was using it on 3G rather than my WiFi - don’t know if it would have been quicker on the WiFi (doubt it - I live in a village with pitifully slow broadband). I used Google, accessed my webmail account, looked up my house on Multimap. The text-based sites were, again not surprisingly, much easier to access than the mapping. But the main irritation is the interface, which is by tabbing across a page rather than pointing to what you want. I think I would have gotten used to it with practice, but would have had to work at it.

The reasons for sending it back are three-fold.

Firstly the screen, although remarkably clear, is slightly darker than a paperback normally would be. I think that's because a book reflects the light from the page, whereas the screen doesn't. I'm a migraine sufferer and sensitive to light, and lack of light, and not totally sure how this would affect me- given that I read for hours on end. (But I have to say in its defence - the print is really clear, and very easy to change size etc. I might be making a fuss over nothing here.)

The major reasons why it's no use to me relate to my job. I'm an academic and I wanted it so that I could read the huge number of pdf articles in my in-tray. Now, it does cope with pdfs. It was very easy to drag and drop the test pdf file. And having the whole page on the screen in portrait is readable, although not for long periods of time as the print is obviously small. You can turn the Kindle on its side and read in landscape, and the print size there is quite comfortable and easy to read. BUT - academics use footnotes. Zillions of them. And reading a pdf document 1/3 of a page at a time means that you can't easily see the footnotes, and so you spend a lot of time paging to and fro, trying to find out where in the document they are.

Also, I speed-read. And in speed-reading technical stuff you need to get a grasp of the overall document, and the individual sections, by skimming and noting headings. When you can only see a part of a page at a time, it’s impossible to speed-read.

Both of these reasons make the Kindle impractical for my work. Which is a shame. It's relatively cheap, and the browsing on WiFi and 3G is free, which is a huge advantage. I liked it - it just isn’t any good for what I want to do.

Hope this helps someone else make their decisions.