Okay I said I probably wouldn’t be getting a Kindle unless somebody gave me one. I felt that the technology had areas to improve and I still have a love affair with the printed book (that is until you have to move all those books).

Well somebody gave me one. Actually it was a trade for some precious Star Wars toys that didn’t have a home. Ray Camden, of Coldfusion notoriety, was happy to oblige the trade.

My first observation I noticed immediately was the poor typography. I noticed many novels were converted with justified text and for a device that was suppose to enhance readability I thought it fell short. Although, the New York Times has the best presentation for a publication on the device thus far.

The device isn’t completely at fault. Apparently the bulk of the typographic problems begin with conversion. Currently there is no reliable method for PDF conversion to the Kindle other than emailing your PDF to Amazon. I’ve tried Stanza with really no success it basically strips out any formatting and embedded images to render a text-only version of a document.

The Amazon conversion also requires a few steps:

If you are not in a wireless area or would like to avoid the ten-cent fee, you can send attachments to “name”@free.kindle.com to be converted and e-mailed back to your computer at the e-mail address associated with your Amazon.com account. You can then transfer the document to your Kindle using your USB connection.

Some novels varied with their typography some were set justified, PDFs had ligatures that were omitted and lacked textual heirarchy. The text rendering is also less than spectacular varying slightly in weight across the display page. However, I must say my reading retention is longer on the Kindle than any other on-screen reading experience and very comparable to a printed novel or newspaper.

I’m still uncertain how glyphs, special characters and ligatures are interpreted on the Kindle. There seems to be only two fonts available, the serif face is apparently Linotype Caecilia the system menus, messages and san-serif face is Helvetica.

Ultimately there is a real need for good typography on the Kindle. Hopefully it’s coming soon.