Two of the Kindle’s most appealing features are its wireless connection, which lets you download new books any time of the day from most places in the US, and the rapidly expanding treasure trove of ebooks available on Amazon. So it’s a sad, sad day when you switch on your Kindle’s wireless and get…nothing. No bars, no signal, no Whispernet, no instant access to that literary treasure chest.

What’s a Kindler to do when her wireless is kaput?

There are several possibilities to explore:

1. Your location.
2. Kindle hardware and software glitches.
3. The problem’s with Amazon.
4. Your wireless is kaput.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to troubleshooting Kindle wireless problems.

First things first

Your wireless probably isn’t kaput.

I know that having the Kindle wireless die completely is something many Kindlers worry about; after all, this is brand new technology and the company’s first hardware product - who knows how reliable it is and what sort of longevity we can expect?

Chances are, though, that even if you can’t get a signal for a whole day or for several days in a row, the wireless in your Kindle hasn’t died, but that something else is afoot. There are several other possibilities worth investigating first.

1. Are you in Kindle’s wireless coverage area? 

Amazon’s Whispernet comes to you courtesy of Sprint’s EVDO network, so you can only use your Kindle’s wireless when you’re in the network’s coverage area.

As you’ll see from the map, urban coverage is pretty good (orange indicates high-speed, green areas get lower-speed connections), but rural folk are left off the map in many places. (Click the image to visit the Kindle coverage map online, where you can search for a particular address.)

Even if you are under Whispernet’s spell, all sorts of things can have an effect on the signal. Bad weather, hills and dales, other wireless devices in your house, that concrete bunker you’re in. Try moving about, going outside or just waiting until the storm passes, then check your connection once more.

2. Is your Kindle having a bad hair day? 

Your Kindle is like most computing devices: sometimes it’ll stop working temporarily, usually for no apparent reason. The simplest solution is often the most effective: turn it off and then back on again.

• Flick both the power and wireless switches to the off position, wait a few seconds, then switch them both back on.
• Sometimes switching the wireless on is not enough; you won’t get a connection until you actually try to connect. Give the Kindle a nudge to go online by clicking the menu button and choosing Shop In Kindle Store.

Still no signal? You may be tempted to try pushing the reset button on the back of your Kindle (under the cover). The word from Amazon is: Don’t! It’s not likely to help, and when you press the reset button, troubleshooting info stored on your Kindle, which might potentially help with fixing errors on your device, is erased.

3. The problem’s at Amazon’s end

The Whispernet is not infallible. Sometimes it silently disappears for a while, then just as quietly returns after five minutes, five hours or even longer.

If you’ve tried various physical solutions and your Kindle is still wireless-less, try patience. It usually works. I’ve had no connection on a fair few occasions - one time for two days - but the signal has always returned.

If your Kindle is brand new, there’s another possibility: Amazon failed to register it properly on its network. If you’ve just received your Kindle and the wireless won’t work at all, give the Kindle support line a call on 1-866-321-8851 to make sure everything’s hunky dory.

4. Your Kindle’s wireless really is dead

If you’ve run through this troubleshooting checklist and you still can’t get a wireless connection within the Whispernet coverage area, your wireless really may be kaput.

If your Kindle is less than a year old (and as I write this, all Kindles are) give the Kindle hotline a call: 1-866-321-8851 from within the US, 1-206-266-0927 if you’re calling from afar.

Other solutions? 

Have you found a different solution to your Whispernet problem? If so, please share it by leaving a comment.

I’ve been away for a week in the wilds of Wyoming. For the trip, my suitcase was jam packed as usual, so I was delighted that instead of loading up further with a handful of books, all the reading matter I took was in my Kindle.

On the road is where the Kindle really shows its worth. It’s also where you’ll encounter its limits.

I love being able to stock it with a variety of reading matter and thus have something on hand to read no matter what my mood. Heading off on a trip that’s part holiday, part work, it’s hard to know exactly where my reading fancy will alight. With my pre-stocked Kindle, I had no worries on that front at all.

On the other hand, I’m really glad I pre-stocked my Kindle.  Once away from New Orleans, I had no luck at all with Whispernet, the Kindle’s wireless service. I couldn’t get a link in the Salt Lake City airport, nor in Billings, Montana, and certainly not in the small town in Wyoming where I ended up.

If you live in a remote area, or even a not-so-remote area, before purchasing a Kindle you might want to see whether you can get Whispernet service. Without it, the Kindle is still usable, but certainly not as convenient. You can check the wireless coverage for your area using the Kindle Coverage Tool. Note that although Amazon’s Kindle page mentions there’s no wireless coverage “for Kindle in Montana and Alaska”, it fails to mention that in many other states the coverage is close to non-existent.

Manual downloads

Fortunately, you don’t have to use Whispernet to get content onto your Kindle. Connect your Kindle to your computer via a USB cable and you can download content manually.

When you purchase a Kindle book on Amazon, you’ll receive it automatically if you’re in Whispernet territory and your wireless is turned on. If your wireless is not switched on, you’ll automatically receive the item next time you switch it on in Whispernet range. At the same time, the item you purchase is placed in your Amazon Media Library. Visit your media library, click the Downloads link and choose any of the Kindle content (books, newspapers or blogs), and you’ll see a list of your purchased titles. Click the Download To Computer button and you’ll get a copy of the Kindle item on your computer. You can then click and drag this item into your Kindle.

It’s nowhere near as slick as using Whispernet, but at least it means you can use your Kindle anywhere you have an Internet connection.

I’ve now had a chance to play with the Sony Reader PRS-505, Sony’s revamped ebook reader.

When you look at the 505 side by side with its predecessor, the PRS-500, it doesn’t look like a whole lot has changed. Appearances are misleading.

Cosmetically, the changes look minor, but in terms of usablity, they’re crucial. The PRS-505’s screen is brighter, making it appreciably more readable than the PRS-500, which was already quite comfortably readable. The brighter screen means you need less ambient light to read. The change puts the Sony screen on a par with the Kindle’s.

Of far more importance is the repositioning of the page navigation buttons. The original Sony had two sets of Page Forward/Page Backward buttons, both sets incomprehensibly located one above the other on the left-hand side of the screen. That positioning made it hard to read single-handedly. The new Sony also comes with two sets of Forward/Backward buttons, but now there’s one set on the bottom left, the other positioned nearthe middle right. With this change, you can now read single-handedly, using either right or left hand; you can also easily ‘turn’ the page without having to move or shift your hands.

This may sound like a minor thing, but it’s not;  it’s huge. Reading comfort and content choice are the two factors developers of ebook readers must get right to attract users and keep them happy. The Sony PRS-505 delivers a highly comfortable reading experience. The brighter screen and well-positioned navigation buttons, coupled with the new slimmer design, make it a pleasure to use.

The Kindle, too, is really comfortable to use, but only when you are sitting and reading. Take the Kindle to bed, though, and those enormous navigation buttons, which occupy almost the whole of each side, will drive you nuts. Bedtime readers will find those large buttons almost unavoidable. You’ll often find yourself turning pages accidentally. The problem is, there’s no place on the side of the Kindle to rest your fingers without hitting a navigation button. When you’re sitting, your fingers can rest on either side of the keyboard; this just doesn’t work when you’re lying down.

So the Kindle fails the bed test. It’ll be interesting to see whether Amazon does anything about this before it produces Kindle Mark II.

Content before comfort 

Although the redesign of the Sony Reader makes it the most comfortable ebook reader around, the Kindle still has the benefits of its much larger book catalogue and wireless downloads. Those two features make it worth the additional asking price.

Still, if Amazon hopes to make the Kindle a long-term hit, it’s going to have to win over many, many more publishers. Ninety-two thousand books sounds like a lot, but it makes for a pretty sparse library. I’ve found that I turn up no more than around 3% of the titles I search for, and maybe 25% of the authors. I’m not too surprised - although certainly disappointed - that the Kindle book store’s popular physics and cosmology shelves are only lightly stocked, but when searches for such diverse authors as Richard Dawkins, Sue Grafton, Donna Leon, Mary Oliver, Anne Fadiman, John Grisham, Tom Clancy and Cass Sunstein turn up almost no titles the differences between the pbook world and the ebook world become painfully apparent.

No-one will care how readable or how cool the Kindle is if there’s no content. And the same goes for the Sony Reader, which has only a fraction of the Kindle’s content.

One of the big complaints about the Kindle is that it can’t handle Adobe Reader files (PDFs).

Well, it turns out that’s not the case. The Kindle can’t store native PDFs, it’s true, but you can use the Kindle’s conversion service to transform your PDFs into the Kindle’s AZW format, and get them onto your device that way.

It sounds clumsy - and it is, a little - but even using this roundabout method you’ll find that Kindle’s PDF support is appreciably better than the Sony Reader’s.

You’ll find no mention of the PDF support in the Kindle marketing hype. That’s because it’s part of Kindle Experimental, a collection of services still being worked on. Other Kindle Experimental services are MP3 support, the Web browser and NowNow. The latter is a research service: submit a question and real people (working for, presumably, pennies an answer) respond, usually within 10 minutes or so. NowNow is the most well developed of the experimental services and it works very smoothly. MP3 and Web browser support, on the other hand, are exceedingly basic. More on both of those later. Today, I’ll stick with that other, unmentioned, experimental service: PDF support.

Kindle document conversion 

Kindle’s PDF support is tied into its document conversion service.

Natively, the Kindle supports only three document formats: plain text, unprotected Mobipocket (.MOBI and .PRC) files, and Amazon’s proprietary AZW. It can also handle MP3 and Audible (.AA) music/audio formats. You can copy files in any of these formats (except .AA) directly to the Kindle from your computer, via a USB connection, or download AZW files wirelessly. To transfer Audible .AA files to the Kindle, you’ll need to use Audible’s AudibleManager software.

That’s not a big range of formats. The Kindle document conversion service expands the range to include Microsoft Word and HTML, plus JPG, GIF, PNG and BMP graphics files. You can’t simply drag and drop these files into your Kindle; instead, you email documents to your Kindle’s email address (each Kindle has two addresses in the form of username@kindle.com and username@free.kindle.com) and the conversion service transforms them into Kindle-digestible format. You can have the converted documents sent directly to your Kindle for 10 cents a pop (by using username@kindle.com), or have them delivered back to your computer for free (using username@free.kindle.com) and then copy them into the Kindle.

It’s not the most elegant of solutions, nor is it instantaneous, but it’s a move in the right direction.

A simple PDF on a KindleSo what about PDFs? There’s no mention of PDF support in Kindle’s docs, but lurking in the online support is a mention of experimental support for PDF document conversion.

I gave it a whirl using both the wireless and free conversion options, and it works decently. The conversion process doesn’t support links and navigation with your PDF document, but it converts text with aplomb and graphics to some degree (let’s face it, neither the Kindle nor the Sony Reader are graphics adept). Formatted lists don’t do too well and tables suffer, but bulk text comes through beautifully. I emailed a 250-page, 2.3 megabyte book in PDF format and got the converted book delivered to my inbox in about five  minutes. Not long after it appeared wirelessly on my Kindle.

For text-heavy PDFs, this is a pretty neat solution.

PDFs on the Sony Reader

The Sony Reader offers drag-and-drop PDF support. You simply drag the PDF directly into the Reader using the (loathesome) eBook Library software.

The same PDF on the Sony ReaderThat’s a less roundabout process than with the Kindle. The results, though, are hit and miss. While some documents look great, others are almost unreadable.

The Sony Reader is, understandably, picky about how PDFs are formatted. After all, you can’t expect a document designed for Letter-size or A4 paper to convert perfectly to the small-screen format on an ebook reader. Unfortunately, even after following Sony’s detailed formatting instructions for creating readable PDFs, even plain-text documents often end up with itsy bitsy, almost unreadable text. And it’s a pain to have to do all the pre-formatting anyway. And, too, what about all those pre-existing PDFs you no doubt have - who wants to try to get them into usable format?

The Reader does a better job with text-heavy Microsoft Word documents, although there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

Take a look at the two images in this post (click either image to see a full-size screenshot - any blurriness is a limitation of my lighting setup and not of the ebook readers). You’ll see that the PDF text on the Sony is very small. This is the result you can expect when you copy a standard PDF across, without going through the rigmarole of reformatting to suit the Reader’s standards. Note that this is the text displayed at its largest size on the Reader. The shot above shows the same PDF given the Kindle document conversion treatment. While the Kindle doesn’t keep the list format as clean as the Reader, its text is far more readable. The photo shows the text set to size 4 (the Kindle’s third largest font).

On the way

As you can see, full PDF support is a long way off for either reader. The graphics limitations, for a start, mean that tables, lists and images don’t translate well.

Having said that, it looks like the Kindle is on the right track with its experimental PDF support, and I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t blossom into something a lot more refined in the future. Sony, too, needs to boost its PDF handling, but given the company’s apparent inability to write decent software to accompany the Reader (eBook Library is, to be kind and generous, a piece of junk), I have less faith in its ability to deliver a good PDF conversion utility. Maybe the competition with Amazon will be the stimulus it needs.

The Kindle and the Sony Reader are both flawed products. They have version 1 written all over them.

And it doesn’t matter.

Get either one of them into your hands, and chances are you’ll be hooked. The convenience factor is sky high, far outweighing the rough edges and design disappointments.

So, how do the two compare?

Where the Sony Reader beats the Kindle:

• Price. They’re both overpriced, but the Reader’s $299 price tag is $100 easier on the pocket than the Kindle’s.
• Initial content. Sony sells the Reader bundled with a couple of hundred dollars worth of credit towards purchasing ‘Classics’ at its Connect eBook store. The ‘classics’ are neatly formatted versions of public domain ebooks – everything from the Aeneid to the works of Mark Twain. These books usually sell for two bucks a piece at the Connect store, and although you can find them in unformatted form for free, the formatting makes a big difference to your reading pleasure.
• Size. The Sony Reader is slim and ultra compact. It measures 6.9 x 4.8 x 0.3 inches. The Kindle is 0.6 inches longer, half an inch wider and 0.4 inches thicker. Both feel pretty comfortable to hold, but there’s no doubt those fractions of an inch give the Sony the edge.
• Looks. The Reader is smart and unobtrusive. Its black-and-chrome (all-chrome is available on the PRS-505) looks a whole lot smarter than the Kindle’s clunky white package. One thing, though: the Kindle is extremely unphotogenic; it looks much better in your hand than it does in its publicity pics.
• The cover. The Reader’s snug-fitting, click-on cover protects it at all times. If you find the black a little boring, you can dress it up with optional red or lime green covers. The Kindle, on the other hand, is ill at ease in its cover. You can’t read it with the cover on – its buttons are obscured (including the On/Off and wireless switches, which are both on the back) and it slips out easily. That means you’ll have it out of its cover - and unprotected - most of the time.
  
• Bookmarks. The Reader’s one-click bookmark button is much easier to use than Kindle’s clumsy dog-earing method.

Where Kindle beats Sony Reader:

• Book selection. The Kindle leaves the Sony Reader in the dust. A broad book selection is especially important if your literary diet goes beyond the bestseller list or the latest romance or mystery from the publishers’ darlings.
• Wireless downloads. This is more than handy; on the road, it’s essential. The fact that Amazon is picking up the tab for the wireless access - and that the Kindle contains a basic Web browser to boot - is the sugar on top of the cherry on top of the cream. Sony’s Connect Book store and software are horrible to use, with excruciatingly poor search capabilities and very slow response times. Getting content into the Reader is frustrating, and trying to organise it once it’s there is painful. In contrast, purchasing through the Kindle store is fun and fast.
• Page controls. Sony got this seriously wrong on its original Reader (the PRS-500), by placing its two sets of Page Forward/Page Back controls right above each other, on the left-hand side. This simply doesn’t work. If you take a look at the recently released PRS-505 (I’ll have a review of this new model for you next week), you’ll see that the page controls have been moved. The Kindle has page controls on both the left and right sides. They work perfectly when you read in a sitting position, enabling easy single-handed reading; they’re not so great if you like to read in bed. Shortening the right-hand control would improve bedtime reading considerably.
• Readability. Kindle’s choice of six font sizes is a lot better than Sony’s small, medium and large choices and the Kindle display is just a little bit crisper.
• Built-in references. The Kindle comes with the New Oxford American Dictionary built in, plus wireless access to Wikipedia. To use the dictionary, scroll to the line containing the word you wish to look up and click: the Kindle looks up every word on the line and displays the definitions. If the New Oxford is not your preferred dictionary, you can purchase another one and then use the Kindle’s settings to set it as the default dictionary for the device. The Sony Reader has no built-in reference tools.
• Search, annotations and highlighting. The Kindle lets you search across all your content, highlight passages and save them to a central My Clippings store (backed up on Amazon’s servers), and add annotations. That built-in keyboard may increase the size of the Kindle, but it has its payoffs.

The Kindle: Not cool, but hot

I passed the Sony Reader and the Kindle around the table at Thanksgiving lunch. Everyone loved them both and everyone thought the Sony Reader much cooler. But as soon as I mentioned that the Kindle was wireless enabled and showed them how that worked, the contest was over: everyone wanted a Kindle.

The Sony Reader has a lot going for it, but in-built wireless really is a killer feature. That Amazon picks up the tab, not only for access to the store (as it should) but also for basic Web access, makes it irresistible. The Kindle also beats out the Reader when it comes to book choice and the overall book-buying experience. The Sony Connect store feels like it was designed by book-buying dilettantes; the Kindle store has the Amazon book-lover stamp all over it. It’s a persuasive difference.

A word on formats

The Kindle and the Sony Reader each use a proprietary format for ebook content. Both devices also provide support for other text and graphics (and audio) formats, but the support is halfhearted.

You may have heard that the Reader supports PDFs while the Kindle doesn’t. That’s true, but getting PDFs onto the Reader in readable form is no picnic, and graphics, in any format, are less than satisfactory on both readers.

There are various workarounds available, including using MobiPocket Creator to convert PDF and Word documents to a usable form, but if PDF support is a must-have for you, neither the Reader nor the Kindle will make you happy.

So, Amazon has finally released its ebook reader, the Kindle. Within 24 hours of its launch, there were a couple of hundred customer “reviews” of the Kindle on Amazon.com, the majority of them uncomplimentary and almost all of them written by people who haven’t even seen the Kindle, let alone used it. Despite the detractors, the Kindle sold out within a couple of days and people are now having to wait to get a Kindle in their hands.

I’ve been a long-term user of the Sony Reader and now have a Kindle resting in my lap. Which is better? Is either worth having?

The short answers: the Kindle and yes.

In the next few posts, I’ll expand on those answers.

What’s great about both readers

When I first started using the Sony Reader, I was not at all sure whether I’d take to ebooks. After all, they don’t have the heft, the page turn, the smell of paper-based books.

Seven months with the Sony Reader have turned me into an ebook devotee, without denting my love for pbooks. The thing is, it’s not an either/or choice: there’s a place for both types of books.

Although pbooks win on sentimental and tactile appeal and on the range of reading material available, there’s a lot to love about ebooks and the Kindle and Sony Reader:

• You have a library in your hand. Instead of loading up your bags with books when you travel, you tuck the ebook reader in your carry-on and lighten your load. You also don’t have to pick and choose which books you take with you – just take a whole bunch of them.
• Get new books when you want them, including in the middle of the night.
• The E Ink technology used in the displays is blissfully easy on the eyes. Readable on the beach or in bed (with a light). Because there’s no backlighting, there’s no eye strain, and the ability to change text sizes on the fly makes ebooks even more readable. The downside is that you must have a light source: you can’t read E Ink in the dark. It makes investing in a clip-on book light worthwhile.
• Automatic bookmarking. Switch your ebook on and it opens to the page you were reading last. You can have multiple bookmarks, too, so you can quickly jump to marked pages in any of your books.
• No dead trees. There’s the environmental impact of the materials in your ebook, the downloading of new content and battery life (remarkably long) to consider, but that’s a smaller footprint than the hundreds or thousands of pbooks you won’t be buying.

What’s not so great

We’re at the early stage of development for ebook readers. Both the Amazon and Sony products have a long way to go to deliver a completely satisfying experience. I have no doubt it will come, but right now it’s not here.

Some of the drawbacks to using the Kindle or Sony Reader:

• Lack of content. Amazon boasts about having over 88,000 books available for the Kindle; Sony’s Connect store offers a fraction of that number. It’s an atom in a drop in a bucket. Unless you restrict your reading to bestsellers and publishers fads, you’ll quickly discover how many, many books aren’t available in eformat.
• It’s all in black and white. There’s no colour support and the graphics capabilities are severely limited. That’s fine when you’re deep into the text, but you won’t want to read illustrated books, books with charts and diagrams, or any book where the design is an integral part of the reading experience. You miss out on cover artwork and photos.

What you might not expect

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos talks about wanting to make the Kindle “disappear”, so you don’t experience the technology, all you experience is the experience of reading. Surprisingly - especially given its clunky looks - the Kindle delivers. So, too, does the Sony Reader.

Which delivers the better experience? I’ll take a look at that tomorrow.