Kindling My Displeasure

I have been an avid, perhaps even rabid fan of the Amazon Kindle since I got one for Christmas last year.  But this week an event has transpired to burst my bubble a little.  (Note to self:  Can bubbles be partially burst?  Seems like no...  Maybe if it were a multichambered bubble, like a heart, and only one chamber burst.  That would tie in nicely with an allusion to a broken heart which would also be appropriate for this tale.  Or perhaps I just need to work on the metaphor a little more...)

At any rate I set my Kindle down one evening after my before-bed read and then picked it up again the next evening to continue on and found this!:

Powering it down and back was little help.  The bottom half of the screen responded, but the upper part with its smeared ink wave and its amputated Harriet Beecher Stowe left it generally illegible.  In my panic I made one of those 11:30pm customer service hotline phone calls which assures you that while your call is important to them, it isn't important enough to staff their U.S. call center at that hour, so you get help from very nice people in Bangladesh or the Punjab provinces.  The lady I talked to, whose English was a little bit thick and a struggle to lock on to, was nevertheless very pleasant and walked me through all the secret tips and tricks to hard-boot my Kindle.  But love was not to be found.  At the end of the day (or rather at the beginning of the next day, by this time), the Kindle was declared a lost cause.  Fortunately, it was still under warranty, so she told me that would ship a replacement out to me immediately for no cost.  Fair enough.  I went to bed that night illiterate, but not inconsolable.

The next day I decided to explore the issue a little further and did a web search or two to find out if this was a prevalent problem.  Unfortunately I found story after story about people whose screens crapped out due to torsion or falls or for no apparent reason at all.  They seemed to happen quite easily and often.  People were  anywhere from a few months to a few days into their Kindle experience.  From the sample set I looked at, I got a longer life than most!  And some were on their third, fourth or fifth Kindle with all their predecessors succombing to the same fate.

I know this was hardly a scientific sampling space - only the people with problems would complain about them, so naturally everyone I heard from had a gripe.  The (hopefully) millions of untarnished Kindle users wouldn't post on those forums.  But still it seemed a little concerning.  The pearl ink technology in the Kindle is such a joy to use, but perhaps it still has some mass production kinks yet to be worked out.  I don't like the idea of having to replace my Kindle every six months, and I'm not exactly sure how the imminent expiration of my warranty in December will play into the replacement policy.  Got conflicting reports from the websites on that one.

As someone who works to develop new technologies for a living, my heart and good wishes go out to Amazon and hope they figure out any systemic problems and rework them.  But I also hope they'll keep me in free Kindles until they can last a few years at a pop.