11 years ago, usability guru Jakob Nielsen wrote that electronic books were a bad idea. Has Kindle 2 changed his mind? Yes:
The new version of Kindle, Amazon.com’s dedicated e-book device, recently shipped with an improved display and various other upgrades. It now provides good usability for reading linear fiction (mainly novels), though it’s less usable for other reading tasks.As an experiment, I bought two copies of the same book: a trade paperback and a Kindle download. Alternating for each chapter, I read half the book in print and half on the Kindle screen. My reading speed was exactly the same (less than 0.5% difference), measured in words per minute.
Of course, one person reading one book is not a proper measurement study. So I can’t say for sure that Kindle has finally reached the nirvana of equal readability for screens and paper. But it did feel that way.
When I was carrying Kindle through the house, I felt like a Star Trek character with a datapad. But when I actually sat down to read the novel, I became so engrossed in the story that I forgot I was reading from an electronic device. This fact alone is high praise for the device designers.
Kindle shines in one area of interaction design: turning the page is extremely easy and convenient. This one command has two buttons (on either side of the device). Paging backwards is a less common action, but it’s also nicely supported with a separate, smaller button.
The device thus offers good support for the task of linear reading — appropriately so, as Kindle’s design is centered on this one use case. While reading, your only interaction is to repeatedly press the next-page button.
Anything else is awkward.