While on a Thanksgiving trip to California, my Kindle decided to go blooey. More technically, the device’s screen was permanently burned with one of those goofy literary images that come up when the Kindle goes to “sleep.” Now Harriet Beecher Stowe’s head and upper torso block most of the text I’d like to read. Because of travel and its preparations, I hadn’t turned the device on for three or four whole days. My bad!
The question of what happens to electronic texts when the hardware goes bad or becomes obsolete has worried me before. Now that it has happened I find myself in a quandary. I’m no fan of the Kindle. To navigate around in a book you must click-click-click through multiple screens. (In a paper-and-binding book, you can flip to where you want to go in about one-tenth the time.) The print on the screen is unattractive, and if the earliest research is to be trusted, the human mind does not process and save information from a screen nearly as efficiently or durably as information from a page.
As I’ve suggested before, the Kindle may appeal largely to older readers for whom it solves long-standing problems (how to take along a stack of books on vacation, for example). Younger readers, with a different experience of reading, may not find them as tempting. From this angle, the evidence offered by John Podhoretz in his editorial in the November issue of COMMENTARY (on a 2010 cruise sponsored by the magazine, he found that “people over the age of 50 were reading” predominately on Kindles and iPads) may not be as “stunning” as he thinks.
Now that my Kindle is useless, I must either (a) purchase a new device that I am not thrilled with, before I was ready to upgrade, or (b) discard the rather substantial investment that I have made in electronic texts by giving up on the Kindle, either by purchasing a different kind of e-reader or waiting for something better. I still believe that the technology must and will eventually reconceive literary text. Right now physical text, designed for a printed page, is simply (and awkwardly) migrated onto an electronic screen, a platform for which it was not designed.
These are the sorts of bad choices that cause a slow bubble of consumer resentment. One more reason to remain skeptical about the future of the Kindle.
Call Amazon customer service. If they can't fix it, you might be surprised what they will offer as an incentive on a replacement.
They offered me $15 off an inferior Kindle than the one I had. I was insulted since my Kindle did what the reporters did after just 13 months of use. I wasn't all that impressed with the offer or the customer support or the "offer".
Loripiper is correct – how about trying option "C" – call Kindle Customer Service for help. 866-321-8851 if you're in the US – if not, find the number for where you are. If your Kindle is still under warranty they'll replace it. If it isn't, they'll probably make you an excellent offer on a replacement. Amazon's Kindle has some of the best customer service anywhere, by far – but they can't help you if you don't contact them.
My first Kindle went bad in much the way you describe — the "screen saver" image wound up stuck on a portion of the screen while the rest of the screen updated. nI called Amazon tech support and was given a free replacement which took under a week to arrive. No incentive for an upgrade, but presumably this was because the Kindle I had bought was less than a month old. nThe e-books I had purchased were still on my account, and downloaded automatically to the replacement. .MOBI format books I had found elsewhere were still on my laptop and were easily transferred to the replacement Kindle. nI use it quite a lot, especially during platelet donations at the Red Cross when I'm nailed to a couch for two hours at a time.