Kindles & Screenplays

Posted in Other Stuff on Oct 14th, 2009

E-readers have been getting a lot of attention recently – in no small part due to Amazon’s super-aggressive marketing of their Kindle. I’ve never owned a Kindle but have had two different models of Sony’s Reader and loved them both. I read all the time and – while I love the heft of a solid paperback in my hand – it is ludicrously cool to have 100 of those books in a super-thin case that only requires recharging every couple of weeks (yeah…weeks). It’s just amazing for someone like me who does a lot of rereading.

But the Next Level for me was dropping my massive script library into a reader and using it to read scripts. So when I read that the now-defunct William Morris Agency gifted all of their employees with Kindles in an effort to cut down on the amount of paper being used printing scripts, I was pumped. They must know something I didn’t, I figured.

They didn’t.

It would be *so* awesome if reading screenplays on a Kindle was remotely comfortable. But it just isn’t – it unnaturally reformats PDFs into something very different, destroying the entire experience. John August does a nice job of demonstrating this on his site.

It’s worth mentioning that the jumbo Kindle DX is a different story – it’s screen is almost 10 inches, making it perfect for reading a script and it doesn’t reformat PDF’s like the smaller version does. But it’s $500 and also quite heavy in the hand (I read for hours at a clip). Which makes it a fail for me.

So I just read on my laptop and wait for technology to catch up to my wants. Like it always does.