Korean on Kindle

I was excited to see that Amazon's new Kindle will display Korean. Just think--you can get Korean books and not have to pay shipping! How cool is that?

Then the reviews started coming back. Not good.

Here's what the Korean font looks like:



(A helpful poster on the mobileread forums uploaded it for me.)

My initial reaction was, "Yeah, that looks pretty clunky." Then I tried actually reading it. Ick. It's even worse than it looks at first glance. There's no way anyone wants to read a book in that font.

Interestingly, the Kindle page used to say "Our Kindle 3 (Latest Generation) also supports Cyrillic (such as Russian), Japanese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), and Korean characters in addition to Latin and Greek scripts." For some reason they've taken that part out of the product description. Hmmmm.

(It does say, "Our vision for Kindle is to have every book ever written, in every language, available in 60 seconds from anywhere on earth." Ambitious. At least it says vision and not our immediate goal within the next two weeks.)

I'm thinking I'll probably get one anyway (I've been researching and drooling for several weeks), but I won't be reading any Korean books on it unless somebody comes up with a font hack.