The End of the Affair

It would seem that all great love affairs come to an end. Seal and Heidi Klum. Washington and Jamie Dimon. Paula Deen and double-decker cheeseburgers on Krispy Kreme buns.

And now, me and my Kindle?

I love my Kindle. I never read in hard copy what I can get on Kindle. Some things I don't read because I can't get them on Kindle. Over the years I've purchased four Kindles for myself: the first, because it was a Kindle! The second, because a new generation came out two months after I got the original Kindle (which I sold to subsidize the purchase of the new one). The third, because my second Kindle was stolen -- by a thief with good taste and a great love of reading? The fourth, because it was the Kindle Fire, on which a digital version of New York magazine is available.

Because I am so enamored of the Kindle, I have even purchased several as gifts. I've evangelized about it on the train, at work, even here. But we may have now come to the end of the road.

Last night I noticed that the back cover of my Kindle was gapping. I snapped it back into place with no clue of the dread that would soon ensue. When I turned it on, I was able to resume reading the book I'd been reading earlier in the day -- from the CFA Institute;  great, light beach reading -- which was a good sign.

However, when I pressed the button for the Home screen, which should show me all the books and newspapers and magazines I currently have saved on the Kindle, I was instead directed to the Kindle Store. Like any insane person, I tried the same thing again and again, hoping for a different result.

None came.

Then it occured to me to reboot the Kindle and try again. After all, isn't that all tech support at your job does? You call in, you have a computer problem, they say, "Have you tried rebooting?" And you're thinking, what good would that do? And even more annoying, rebooting your PC actually fixes the problem.

So I tried rebooting the Kindle. And unlike as is so often the case with the PC, that didn't fix my problem. I wasn't home, so I decided to wait until I could contact Amazon and deal with the problem calmly and rationally.

I won't take you through the blow-by-blow, but suffice it to say that I had to explain 36 times to two different people that rather than take me to my Home screen, the Home key takes me to the Kindle Store before the second person said, "So when you press the Home key it takes you to the Kindle Store instead of your Home screen?" I should have known this progress would not bode well for the rest of the interaction.

In the end, they couldn't fix the problem (though they had me reboot a googol of times, even though I told them I had already tried rebooting) but did offer to sell me a replacement Kindle (same model) for $85. That price is less than half of what a new one retails for today and only one of the Kindle models currently on offer costs less. That particular Kindle has less functionality than mine, so in all I guess the price is an okay deal.

I asked if I could get expedited shipping and was told that I could -- for a price. That really disappointed me given that I'd be surprised if anyone has purchased and been responsible for as many Kindle purchases by others as I have. Exhausted by the process, I let it go. Thankfully, afterward the representative did investigate providing free expedited shipping and found she was able to make that happen.

I would have just relied on my Kindle Fire as my primary reading device and gone without the e-ink Kindle, but it is simply impossible to read the Kindle Fire at the beach. Which is where a considerable amount of my weekend reading gets done this time of year. Also staining my relationship with my Kindle is that the price for a Wall Street Journal subscription on Kindle has mushroomed in the last year or so. Every few months I receive an email with a notice of a $4 increase in the monthly subscription price and this has happened easily three times. Which is curious to me given how rife with typographical errors the Kindle version is. I guess somebody's got to pay for all of Rupert Murdoch's lawsuits.

So all of this has come together to dampen my fire (sorry, pun intended) for my erstwhile e-reading device. Let us hope that its triumphant return Kindles my ardor once again.