Letters to the Editor
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Stupid name too..
Kindle=Fire
Fire+Book=?
Nothing good occurs to me. Nazis, maybe. That's about it.
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Amazon's Kindle
Hey guys,
A simple trip, call, or email to your public library can save you bunches of money. Books, in their original form are available FREE, although your tax dollars have already paid for them. Stop wasting your money. Use your public free library.
Librarian
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Kindle does support your media
Apparently the Kindle does support "mobi" format, and you can purchase software to convert your own PDFs into mobi, and load it via SD card or USB.
This opens up a number of possibilities for carrying around company or industry specific information on the device. Along with your copy of War and Peace.
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$400 Too Much
Real book fanatics use their public library, supplemented by gifts and loans from fellow fanatics. I can't remember the last time I bought a hardcover book. I go to library sales and my local used book store to get paperbacks for traveling.
When too many books pile up in my house I take them back to the used book store, donate them to my library, or give them away. So Farhad Manjoo's calculations about how many books you would need to buy over the course of the lifetime of the device is meaningless to me.
I still think $9.99 is a lot to pay for an e-book that has no printing costs and virtually no distribution costs. Especially since I can't sell it, lend it, or even give it away when I'm done with it.
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Maybe a library
Though mine seems underfunded and most of the books I want are always checked out. Plus anything the fundies don't like they keep checked out permanently to keep the devil words out of the hands of good Christians.
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Don't get sand on it?
I'm holding out for an ebook reader that still functions after it's been tossed in a damp and sandy beach bag, dropped in the bathtub, run over with a bicycle, been spat-up upon by a toddler, knocked down a flight of steps, and left out in the rain. One with a full-color, extremely high resolution display that handles graphics and text equally well. One with an open, natural language-based interface that's had hundreds of years of user-testing. One available on media that could potentially last for centuries. One with a well-developed aftermarket and a centralized repository where I can borrow all sorts of etexts for free (not just out-of-copyright works).
Oh, wait, it's already available.
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to be fair though
A book is not the perfect indestructible product either. Hell, maybe the eBook reader is bulletproof, unlike a book. The fact that electronic devices are fragile is not an entirely valid criticism. So are cell phones, and laptops and iPods.
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I've been waiting for this device
...but I'll wait some more. Too expensive and clunky. Perhaps they should have two page screens, like a real book? The price of the books could be lowered as well, as there is no binding, no printing, no shipping, no freakin' nothing but electronic dots.
We should buy or load the books as little plug ins, like a flash drive, and be able to sell or give them to others, instead of being dependent on an over-controlling Amazon website, which seems to be the case here.
Also, how deep is the back catalog? Nil? Probably only new books right now. Still, right direction.
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Another drawback
Tying Kindle to the Sprint network is a major mistake. Lots of people (myself included) don't have access to Sprint. If there were a WiFi interface as an alternative, that would work, as we have DSL and WiFi in the house. But, as it is currently configured, Kindle is of about the same use to me as a brick.
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A big waste of Money - call me old-fashioned
Sorry, to me it's like the i-pod, another over-hyped electronic gizmo, another huge waste of money. Don't want it and don't need it.
I have an extensive hardback (and softback) library - probably the biggest private collection in the place where I live. Most of the books (apart from my academic texts, that I have kept) set me back no more than $5.95 to $7.95 each. (I ordered them from Edward Hamilton at discount rates).
All top quality fare - like Noam Chomsky's 'On Language' and Stephen Hawking's 'The Universe in a Nutshell'.
Why should I set myself back some $400?
In addition, call me an old fart but I happen to like the feel and texture of paper and turning pages - not to mention th esmell of a new book, just opened for the first time. Best high of all.
I already have a laptop for e-mails and can get all the online news access I want for free.
Bezos' latest gizmo will merely be another over-inflated electronic boondoggle except for the electro-geek squad and those who always have to have the latest new toys.
Have fun, but count me out!
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Saving paper???
So the paper savings supposedly constitute some sort of environmental benefit? How about the fact that you're using COAL to read a book? That's where electricity comes from, for the vast majority of Americans. What folly...
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If Apple made it
and applied their marketing magic, I'm sure you'd be trumpeting it as a thing of genius...
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I know I'm in the minority but I'm excited
I can read 8 books a week and regularly read at least 8 a month so I'm pretty sure this will work out money-wise for me. I travel for business trips and I hate lugging around 4-5 books. I also don't drive, so libraries and used-book stores don't work so well for me. Regardless, I lack the patience to wait that long to get my hands on a new book.
I just end up with an ever-growing mound of books - most of which I won't read again. Sure, I try to pass them off to friends, but they insist on giving them back to me when they're done. There will probably be a few special books I will still want in printed form but for the vast majority, who cares? I can't wait until my Kindle arrives.
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The reading experience, + "virtual ownership"
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.