Here are a couple of observations about reading newspapers on the new Kindle e-reader. First: reading is a ritual, which most of us begin practicing at an early age. Second: it’s not easy changing a ritual, especially when it’s been reinforced for a long time, on a daily basis. Third: rituals have nuances and details, and changing a detail is like a mosquito bite; it’s hard to resist the temptation to keep scratching it until it festers. Reading is a very personal ritual, and we all do it somewhat differently; so the impact of Kindle on your reading ritual may be different than mine. But for whatever it’s worth, here’s how it impacted me …

I have a reading ritual which began on weekend mornings roughly 25 years ago, when my kids were little; now that they’re grown and gone, it has evolved into a daily ritual: I get up relatively early in the morning, tip-toe quietly to the front door to avoid waking anyone (which now consists of only my wife and my dog), and retrieve The New York Times waiting on the door-mat. I walk to the kitchen to get a glass of grapefruit juice, then back to the living room — where I stretch out comfortably on the sofa, and proceed to read certain portions of the paper. I always read the headlines on the front page, guided by the size of the headlines; and while some of the articles are sufficiently boring that I skip them altogether, I generally read whatever portions of those front-page articles are actually printed on the front page. Roughly half of the front-page articles are sufficiently interesting that I’ll turn to whatever inner-page contains the remainder of the article, and read them to completion. Then I turn to the last two pages of the first section, where I’ll scan the editorials and the op-ed columns to see which ones look sufficiently relevant and interesting to warrant a careful read. It’s worth noting, also, that my decision to read an op-ed column is somewhat dependent on the columnist’s identity — e.g., I’ll almost always read Tom Friedman’s op-ed pieces, even if the title doesn’t look particularly interesting. I’ll then look at the business section of the paper in the same fashion, and I may (or may not) glance at the front page of the sports section, the metro section, and various other sections of the paper. All of this consumes about 30 minutes, after which I get a cup of coffee and wander into my office (next to the living room), where I scan a pre-determined set of Web sites and blogs to round out my daily “review” of news and information that’s relevant to me.

None of this is necessarily good or bad, right or wrong; it’s just the way I’ve decided to read the news — with the emphasis here on read. My wife generally reads the entire paper, cover to cover, though not necessarily in one sitting; I simply don’t have the time, the attention span, or the interest to do so. I never read the obituary section, while my wife reads it carefully, every day; and she tells me that some of the best writing in the New York Times is in the sports section. Maybe so; maybe I just don’t appreciate good writing. In any case, her ritual for reading the paper is somewhat different than mine — and yours is probably different from hers and mine.

But this morning, the ritual changed: I fetched the paper, as usual, but didn’t even open it as I sat down on the sofa with my glass of juice. Instead, I turned on my Kindle machine, downloaded today’s copy of the Times, and read it on the machine. I don’t know whether this would have taken more time, or less time, than reading the information in the old-fashioned way, because I stopped several times to jot some notes about what I was doing. And having done it only once so far, I don’t really know whether I’m reading more information, or less information, or different information, on the Kindle than in the hard-copy version. This will all eventually become clear, after a couple of weeks of daily Kindle-reading … assuming that I do continue reading it on the Kindle machine. Meanwhile, though, here are my first impressions:

1. The physical experience of holding a small, lightweight 4-by-6 device is obviously different than holding a large, full-size section of printed newspaper; overall, I’d say the Kindle is preferable. I find printed newspapers to be somewhat awkward and clumsy to hold, to fold, and to flip from one page to the next; and since I only want to hold one section of the paper in my hands at a time, that means I have to find someplace else (e.g., the floor, the coffee table) to drop the other sections. And you’d be amazed how much of a nuisance it can be to simply find the business section, when it’s buried among several other irrelevant (to me, anyway) sections of the paper.
2. Of course, I could also have chosen to read the newspaper on my laptop computer, since I have a wireless connection to the Internet. But laptops are relatively large and heavy and awkward; and depending on the lighting in the room, the backlit screen may or may not be easily visible. Overall, Kindle does well in this area.
3. If I decide to subscribe to the New York Times (or any one of 7 other U.D. newspapers, plus The Irish Times, Le Monde, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine — but no British, Canadian, Australian, or Asian newspapers), then I can expect it will have been downloaded onto my Kindle by the time I get up in the morning. But I’m not yet ready to make that commitment, which means I have to order/download each day’s issue of the paper as a separate transaction. It’s a painless, Amazon-style one-click operation (billed directly to the credit card associated with my Amazon account); but it’s interesting that it actually takes six clicks to make it work: “Home,” “Menu,” “Shop in Kindle Store,” “Newspapers,” “New York TImes,” and “Today’s Edition.” Maybe there’s some what I can create a bookmark or shortcut to accomplish all of this in one click; if so, I haven’t figured it out yet.
4. Because Kindle displays everything in black and white, none of the newspaper photos are in color. Duh! Interestingly, it’s been only a few years since the New York Times began adding a color photo to the front page of each section of the paper, and I guess I’ve gotten used to it. The result is that the paper I’m reading on Kindle seems a little … well, dull.
5. More importantly, there is very little “implied prioritization” of the front-page articles, based on the size of the headline. Using the default font size on my Kindle, I can see headlines of three front-page articles, and three lines of introductory text for only the first two of those articles. If I push the “next page” button, I see one more quasi-high-priority headline/summary, and then the first three headlines of what Kindle describes as “other front page articles”; there are six more such headlines on the third page. All in all, I’m not sure I like this arrangement; it’s not that the task of selecting articles is impossible or even difficult — but it has definitely changed the detail and nuances of that selection process in the traditional print-version of the paper.
6. On the plus side, Kindle makes it very easy for me to see a list of the newspaper sections, and then go directly to whichever one I want to read. No more piles of unread sections of the paper all over the floor, no more wondering where they’ve managed to hide the business section in today’s issue.
7. But on the negative side, the display of op-ed columns doesn’t show the columnists’ name — all you see is the title of the op-ed piece. So I had to click through all of them to see that “Debating Iraq’s Transition” was written today by Tom Friedman, and that “She’s No Morgenthau” was written by Maureen Dowd.
8. Note that I hyperlinked the two columnists, and their respective columns, in the bullet-point above. I did that partly because I’m just a terrific guy (and loyal, thrifty, and brave, too), but also because I often find articles in newspapers and magazines for which I’d like to bookmark the URL of the Internet-based version of the document, so I can refer to it later on my laptop. Do you think that something like that would be easy in Kindle? Short answer: no. I can create a bookmark for the downloaded Kindle page, and I can save the entire page (which, to be precise, is a single “Kindle page,” not the “logical page” representing the entire article) in the Kindle “Clipping File.” Then, as a separate activity, I can connect the Kindle to my laptop/desktop PC and copy the Clipping File as a text file onto the PC. Better than nothing, I suppose, but not terribly useful if the ultimate objective is to get my hands on something that I can cut-and-paste (or import) into my PC Web browser. On the other hand, I can’t do any of this stuff with the print-version of the paper, so perhaps I should shut up and stop complaining.
9. Because you don’t have the usual process of “select some text” by dragging and clicking with a mouse, and because there’s no obvious cut-and-paste mechanism, there’s no easy way to select some text from an article and then easily look it up on Wikipedia or Google — which, of course, you can do easily on your laptop/desktop computer. Thus, when Maureen Dowd cited a pithy remark in her op-ed column from a Boston-based lawyer named Joan Di Cola, I was momentarily stymied when I wanted to find out more about Ms. Di Cola. It’s not impossible, just slightly tedious: you have to click on the “search” button at the bottom of the Kindle console, type the search phrase with the little chiclet-size keyboad (i.e., the entire phrase “Joan Di Cola”) and then wait for a couple seconds for Kindle to tell you that it found one reference in the New York Times issue you’re reading (Duh! I knew that!), it found no definitions in its built-in dictionary, and it would be happy to continue the search (using its wireless connection to the Interent) using Wikipedia, Google, or the Kindle/Amazon book store. Ms. Di Cola turns out to be unknown to Wikipedia, unpublished on Amazon (though, technically, Kindle only tells you about the books it knows about, not all 3 million Amazon titles), but well-known to Google.

Oh, yeah, one more thing: the obituary section is there, in all its glory, in the Kindle edition of the paper. As far as the New York Times is concerned, only one noteworthy person died today. And I still don’t care …

Meanwhile, I made some notes on a few other features and idiosyncrasies of the Kindle machine. But I’ll save those for another post. I decided to download today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal — another 75 cents down the drain! — so I think I’ll see if I can navigate that any more easily than the New York Times …