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I'm all for new technology. But with my short time of owning a Kindle DX Graphite, I have found that a paperback still provides a superior reading experience. And it is not just because paper still has better contrast than a Pearl e-ink screen.
Formatting is the biggest issue I have with Kindle e-books. The variety of fonts a publisher uses in a paperback are gone. Without different fonts, font size changes are confusing. Many times you will read one paragraph in one font size, directly followed by a paragraph with a larger font with no space in between. You end up seeing one block of text with two font sizes.
The spacing between paragraphs and margin sizes are changed from the original. Headers and footers are missing. Superscript and subscript are ignored. The list goes on. Basically, all the formatting techniques the publisher implements to make the text a pleasurable reading experience in the original book are stripped from the contents. All that is left are the words on the page, divided into paragraphs, and retain basic punctuation such as quotes, commas, and periods.
These are my experiences from my short time owning the Kindle this past month and from downloading books through Whispernet.
Interestingly enough, I was able to come across pdf versions for a couple of these same books. The pdf retains all of the original formatting of the paperback. The reading experience with the pdf are actually almost as good as reading a paperback (aside from the lack of contrast on the screen). I sincerely hope Amazon can upgrade their .asw format to replicate what is found on the pages the paperback versions.
Otherwise, Amazon's current high pricing and poor formatting of e-books outweighs the portability benefit of an e-reader for me and it really only makes sense to stick with paperbacks.
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