Andrew Savory: Did a book kill my Kindle?

I have what is now called the Kindle Keyboard, a 3rd generation Kindle that I bought on 18 October last year. Like my laptop, it’s now dead. Incredible, right?

Aside from observations on how all the gadgets I bought last October are now breaking – less than 2 months outside of warranty – I am left wondering whether in this instance a book has killed my Kindle.

For a few days before the Kindle died, it had been freezing whilst reading The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald (it’s a great book by the way, don’t let me put you off). Around 80% through, every couple of pages it would hang, requiring a forced restart. I also noticed that this book includes graphics which show up on my TouchPad but not on the Kindle 3, and that on both devices it has horrific paragraph spacing.

Whilst reading up on different ways to restart the Kindle, I came across reference to potential indexing problems. Apparently the Kindle can sometimes get stuck indexing a book. The symptoms sound similar: extremely flaky device, and constantly having to recharge it. (Having left mine to recharge all night, I’ve just plugged it in again and it wants recharging, even though all I’ve done in the last 20 minutes is try to restart it.)

So here I am with a Kindle that won’t restart, once again stuck with the cost of ecosystem lock-in and the apparent need to include the cost of warranty extensions in my purchasing decisions.

Update 22:05: So I just went through the fault with Amazon’s (really quite good) Kindle support telephone line. It’s great to be able to click “Call me” and have them phone you right away and talk you through the issue.

Their suggestion was to plug the Kindle into a laptop for half an hour: apparently, the laptop charging is ‘different’ to charging via the Kindle charger. And indeed, after 30 minutes the Kindle booted into USB mode. When I unmounted it from the laptop it booted back into the home screen, and I was able to move the cursor down one menu item, but as soon as my books reappeared the device hung again.

I spoke again with Amazon support, and they suggested charging it for longer. Otherwise, as the device is out of warranty, they couldn’t replace it but they did offer me a discount on a replacement device as a one-time exception. The discount was reasonable, but still put the replacement in the realms of “quite a bit more than buying real books and bookcases”, especially in the context of a device lifespan of just 14 months.

I also don’t have much confidence in this approach as the problem feels like a software issue rather than a hardware issue – given the Kindle boots, allows some input (not enough to perform a factory reset), and then hangs. I’m definitely not about to pay for a hardware replacement if the fault is a software bug.

So I guess I’ll finish reading my remaining Kindle books on the Touchpad, and then look around for alternative ereader devices. The ready availability of electronic books is a model that definitely works well for me: I’ve read 81 books on the Kindle in the year since I first got it. It works out at more than one a week – that’s probably the most prolific reading I’ve done since I was at school.

But I’m not going to pay a hardware tax on ebooks every year.