Letters to the Editor
kevred
Published Letters: 92 Editor's Choice: 8
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The reading experience, + "virtual ownership"
[Read the article: Amazon's Kindle won't spark your e-book fire]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So, it's portable, you can't read it in the dark but you can read it in full sunlight, and there's a half-second delay between pages.
So, pretty much just like a regular book, then?
Nothing against Amazon or anyone who enjoys this product, but I can't help feeling like this addresses a need that isn't really there. The only advantage of this seems to be having access to a (potentially) enormous number of books/publications at once. But just how short are our attention spans when we have to have that much material in one device?
It's not like music, where songs are typically only a few minutes each and shifting between different artists or genres is something that decades of radio have made natural (and to fill any length of time, you'll need a fair number of tracks). But even if you're reading a couple of books per day, do we need to use a $400 electronic device to do it? A book, a magazine, and a newspaper can easily be carted around in the same space as this thing, and seems like a sufficient amount of information at once for anyone.
Maybe this is the same old Luddite line that's been sung about music--moving from vinyl to CDs to MP3s has steadily diminished the breadth of experiencing an artist's work. But I worry that this trend is turning artistry into just information. Data.
In the Kindle, every book looks exactly the same. The aesthetic association you have with every book is exactly the same, and determined by Amazon. Artwork, paper, typography, design, they all vanish, replaced with the clunky, generic appearance of this device. On one hand, this could be idealized as creating a 'blank slate' that returns the focus of the experience to the words themselves. But I'll be damned if this can match the experience of diving into one of my old Fritz Lieber or Isaac Asimov paperbacks, with their fantastic cover art, yellowed pages, and typography and packaging that evoke a mood as strongly as any theater set or soundtrack.
To be fair, that's not what the Kindle is designed to replace. But if this is the future, that's what it will replace.
Another thing that worries me about this is how it further erodes the notion of ownership. As music and books become more virtual, and software moves from a hard product to an entirely online or subscription-based model, more and more of our everyday experience and lifetime accumulation of knowledge, arts, and tools will become a simple lease. Objects become an intangible collection of binary data. Keep paying, or you don't own anything. There's a certain nihilistic liberation to that idea, but I find it pretty troubling that our capitalist model's insatiable demand for growth is so monstrous that its next frontier is making sure we never truly have to stop paying for anything we buy.
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That they have the right to do it doesn't make it right
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A couple commenters here have posted to the effect that nothing the NFL or cable providers are doing is illegal, that they're perfectly within their rights to do what they're doing, so everyone who doesn't like it can just deal with it.
Objectively speaking, that's true, but it's not really the issue.
What is the issue is the bait-and-switch approach that the NFL and the big cable systems are pulling on fans. It's true that we don't have a right to see anything on TV. It's all a product, and products exist in a marketplace. And we know that the more such product can be moved from public venues (public airwaves) to private venues (private cable & satellite systems, and specialized networks), the more intense is the money-making potential for those who control the private channels.
But what this current NFLN vs. cable fight is showing is that the customers are the lowest priority for both parties--all they're concerned about is not just getting money from fans, but getting as much as they possibly can, no matter what.
The NFL has thrived, has been swimming in oceans of money, for decades now, just by showing a few games per week on broadcast TV channels. Yet we're supposed to believe that restricting their product to fewer channels, and the cable & satellite providers gouging consumers to then see that product, is somehow economically necessary?
Everyone involved has the perfect right to do what they're doing. But what they'll end up doing is wrecking the sense of community and shared experience of the NFL. I'm sure for most Salon readers, cable (and probably HD digital cable, Dish, or satellite TV) is a given. But hauling these games up into the elite tiers of pay TV is leaving out millions of people who don't have the option of paying through the nose or leaving their house & family for a few hours to hang out in a bar. The day after Thanksgiving, no one I know had seen the Colts game. Is that really what the NFL wants? Because that's what the NFL will get. Tonight (Thursday), I won't be watching any TV at all. Is that really what the TV providers want? Because that's what they'll get.
Everything the NFL and cable will gain from this squabble, they'll lose to the NBA, MLB, and any other sport that gives its fans what they want in basically the same way it always has. I've been a lifelong NFL fan, but every year more junk piles up that interferes with my enjoyment of it. The NFL may think that I and other fans will go as far as they want to drag us, but it's just not so.