What more do you want from me, Kindle?

I've not made much of a secret of my purchasing a Kindle, largely due to my evangelizing the stupid thing whenever the opportunity arises. Despite what some people would have you believe, I do not ardently desire the death of printed books, libraries, or puppies (an unrelated story for another time). I do, however, believe that printed books could use some competition. My purchase of the electronic daemon-tome was justified (to myself) on the basis of a few facts:

1. It's cheaper to purchase new books on the Kindle than to buy the physical copy. Most books are released as hardcovers, with paperbacks that follow a year or two later. For the most part, I don't mind waiting as a) I don't want to spend $17-20+ for a book, and b) I dislike reading hardcover books because I never know what to do with the jacket. There are, however, certain exceptions (theDresden Files series, to name one) that I would buy anyway, and it's not so bad to find out about new books and be able to snag them for $10 a shot. Recent excellent acquisitions because of this: The Magicians (absolutely recommended to anyone who liked Narnia), Idiot America and Fool.

2. Used Kindles, which are just as usable as the new ones, are cheaper than the $300 entry price point. I got mine for $175, which means that after 17 or so hardbacks, I broke even.

3. Free e-books are available, both legally (public domain—antiquities,classics) and not-so. I've read all of Dan Brown's books (so I have a legitimate basis to criticize them), but have not had to pay for it using anything other than my time, intelligence and a smidgen of my soul.

4. It's far more convenient I read. A lot. And rather quickly, too, which means that going on a trip or moving no longer means carting around an extra half-dozen books._

5. Most importantly, there is no material difference between the electronic version and the paper version.

This last point would have been an absolute deal-breaker. While some books obviously would not translate to the Kindle very well (graphic novels spring immediately to mind), I assumed the experience of reading an e-book would be akin to reading a regular book. Hell, I was willing to give them slack and only count those books purchased through the Kindle Store, and leave the ... (ahem) other books out of the comparison. Unfortunately, this has not been my experience thus far. By and large, I've been ... okay with the quality of the books purchased through the Amazon store. There are, however, serious glaring problems with a few books that—had anyone in a position to edit such things actually proofread the books—are frankly inexcusable, at least to a word-nerd like me. In order of increasing severity:

• Justified text
  This is wrong. Justified text is impossible to read, because it stretches out the spaces inbetween words in order to be able to fill the line. Most people use typography and design as contextual clues to how words should be read. If you randomly insert spaces into the text, people assume they're supposed to read those passages slower. One can only imagine the savage corneal-rape that would occur should someone try to read a Jonathan Safran Foer or a Douglas Coupland novel. The biggest problem with using justified text is the way it screws with paragraphs. For those novels that use this method, it creates an unwieldy mass of text scattershot around the page, clumping together in strange places like random animals fornicating in the night, casting unseemly and surreal shadows.

• HyphensCoupled with the fact the Kindle treats hyphen breaks the way most computers do (i.e. not breaking up hyphenated words), long-phrases-used-for-comedic-effect get broken onto different lines. Don't even get me started on the books that used hyphens for the print versions, dumped the text on the Kindle and left the hyphens in even though they didn't occur at line breaks in electronic form.

• Footnotes
  For the most part, this isn't a huge issue. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. For those who use explanatory footnotes to explain a word (Shakespearean plays, etc.), this would be mildly annoying. For those who use/abuse the footnotes to throw in a joke or two (Christopher Moore, author of the aforementioned Fool), this would be a huge pain—trust me, I tried to read it, and the footnotes didn't help much. But for those whose entire book depends upon footnotes (I'm thinking specifically of Bill Simmons' Now I Can Die In Peace, which consists solely of reprinted columns that are footnoted with context/jokes. The footnotes comprise fully half the book's length), it's an absolute deal-breaker. I would not buy one of his books for Kindle, simply because it would be such a huge pain. To click on each footnote is a three-step process, and another step/page load to get back to the original text.

• Laziness
  This last point kind of covers the first two, but is more encompassing. While lazy layouts are certainly annoying, it's simply infuriating to purchase a product the publishers so clearly didn't put any time into. Aside from the aforementioned extraneous hyphens, the biggest thing I've noticed about Kindle books is they're poorly spell-checked. In David Cross' I Drink For A Reason, his two uses of the words "conscious" are replaced by "conscience," even though they appear in completely different sections. Public Enemies, in addition to hyper-hyphenation, also suffered from numerous misspellings.

The bottom line is I hate being sold a product that is inferior.I realize  these are extremely minor points, but I purchased the Kindle with the  expectation the electronic products would receive the same oversight as the printed products. While it would be foolish to sell the Kindle at  this point (given how many books I've purchased on it and what the return would be), it's also unlikely I'll be impulse-buying a lot more  titles—at least, until I'm convinced they've actually started to care about the reading experience of each one.