Kindle Music Experiments

This summer I had the opportunity to try the sheet music newly available for the Kindle, the wireless reading device made by Amazon. I tried both the regular (6″) sized Kindle and the KindleDX, which has a 9.7″ screen.

From Kindle Experiments

Right now, Kindle treats sheet music as it does any other image. Most images you might come across on a Kindle would be book illustrations or images accompanying a news story, which can be zoomed to as big as the screen on the Kindle. You can’t make the image bigger than the screen, which is prohibitive when viewing a page of music on the Kindle. The image above intentionally captures my thumb for scale purposes. This is as large as the music will go! Obviously it would not be conducive to use as a sheet music replacement for practicing or performing, but there are other uses I can see for it. It could be a way to bring along a score to a performance, or to study your music while on the road even if you aren’t able to practice. It should be noted that there is no backlighting on the Kindle, so while it works well in the outdoors with no glare, it could not be used effectively in a dark theater without an additional light source of some kind.

From Kindle Experiments

On the Kindle DX, the screen is larger, but side by side with a page of regular 8 1/2 x 11 music, you can see how it is still considerably smaller, and almost seems squished horizontally.

From Kindle Experiments

One advantage of the Kindle DX is that you can choose portrait or landscape view. I was optimistic that this would enhance the viewing of music, but because it treats the music like an image and not like its own entity, the image is actually smaller in landscape view since it is still trying to fit it all on one page. If you attempt to zoom in from this angle, it will make it larger, but also flip it back to portrait view.

From Kindle Experiments

One feature of the Kindle and Kindle DX that I really like is the ability to select a text size, whether you need a bigger font or prefer to fit more on a page at once. It works so well for reading a book, newspaper, magazine, etc., but this functionality does not carry over into music viewing. I think Amazon will need to develop a file format for music that goes beyond an image file so that users would have as many options with music as they do with text. I was surprised they didn’t go in the direction of working with Scorch, for instance, which to me would make much more sense (but also might require more audio functionality as well).

So would I suggest the use of a Kindle for music? Not really, not yet, but I’m excited to see how they improve on it, or perhaps how other similar products develop in the next few years.