It has been reported that Sherman Alexie made negative comments about the Kindle at the recent BookExpo but perhaps they were simply the asking of questions about the social and political nature of "book-like things" and the delivery systems technologists from the monks who invented the codex to Gutenberg to E Ink have wrought. Read his follow-up comments here. What's interesting is that you can't stop the movement of technology but that fear and anxiety emerge from the darkness ahead. Read Trithemius's In Praise of Scribes (1492). There have indeed been significant changes in the aesthetics of "delivery systems" and book culture over the past thousand years, which have always had an effect on the way books are read.
The question of why a $249 iPod is more acceptable than a $249 Kindle is an interesting one. It lies, to some extent, in financial priorities and issues of time and pastime. It also may lie in the difference between a book and a record/CD, which are currently old technologies. In the old days, when you bought a record, a cassette or CD, you then needed a player, so we got used to that. With an iPod, you simply have another player. With a book, when you bought the book, you had the capacity for an immediate experience, with no intermediate need. With an eReader (Kindle, Sony Reader, etc.), you do. What Alexie is showing us, clearly and directly, is that intermediacy has its consequences.
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I think the question of whether people really want a dedicated book reader is a valid one. Sales of the Touch and iPhone are growing much faster than iPods. Both of these play music, but also have a huge library of applications available.
What follows from this? Once the screens get a little larger (call it a "netbook"), why wouldn't you want to read books on the same technology you use for everything else?
There's also the important issue of copy protection (DRM). Buying an ebook for the Kindle means that you can read it on only a limited number of devices. Also, you're dependent on Amazon staying in the field? In the music world, this happened several times, most recently when Microsoft abandoned Fairplay. Yet publishers are making the same mistakes the music industry did.
It's a mistake, I believe, to look to some equipment that will make reading ebooks acceptable. It's all out there now, and we have a couple of generations now that are quite happily reading computer screens. Ebook publishers should be focusing on selling ebooks, period, not wasting time with the technology side of it.
I have an eReader [Kindle] and iPhone and older iPod. I listen to recorded books while driving or exercise walking with my iPod, as it has a long battery life. I read books on my iPhone when I'm caught waiting somewhere and don't have another book in another form with me. I prefer reading books on my Kindle most of the time. My Kindle and iPhone Kindle app can synch with each other, always putting me at the last page read in a book shared on both. So, I can read my purchased books on two different devices.
Each device has their place, each is useful, each allows me the convenience and joy of books when ever and where ever I wish.
I occasionally buy tangible books too, if they're more suitable to the paper page, usually when there are illustrations I wish to enjoy in detail.
Of course, some publishers and authors refuse to let their books be distributed electronically, stubbornly attempting to avoid change and hold back progress. It's hopeless and in the meantime, they're losing sales and readers like me.
I have an eReader [Kindle] and iPhone and older iPod. I listen to recorded books while driving or exercise walking with my iPod, as it has a long battery life. I read books on my iPhone when I'm caught waiting somewhere and don't have another book in another form with me. I prefer reading books on my Kindle most of the time. My Kindle and iPhone Kindle app can synch with each other, always putting me at the last page read in a book shared on both. So, I can read my purchased books on two different devices.
Each device has their place, each is useful, each allows me the convenience and joy of books when ever and where ever I wish.
I occasionally buy tangible books too, if they're more suitable to the paper page, usually when there are illustrations I wish to enjoy in detail.
Of course, some publishers and authors refuse to let their books be distributed electronically, stubbornly attempting to avoid change and hold back progress. It's hopeless and in the meantime, they're losing sales and readers like me.
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