Geekery

Gadget: The Kindle

Posted on 11. Aug, 2009 by Jake in Gadgets

The great, hilarious irony in recent tech news is surely Amazon’s stealthy remote deletion of an unauthorised novel from users’ Kindles – a novel that turned out to be none other than George Orwell’s 1984, the dystopian cautionary tale against the surveillance state.

The story may have been overhyped at first, but it raises another, more positive, thought: if Big Brother is watching, maybe people will start switching the pulp detective stuff for something more respectable.

This is a thought that turns out to be completely wrong.  As Nicholson Baker points out his awesome piece, Kindle sales have been boosted by sales of erotic romances, kitschy vampire tales and other stuff you’d be too embarrassed to buy at Exclusive Books.

Nicholson Baker’s piece is awesome in no small part because Nicholson Baker is awesome, but it also happens to be completely wrong.

Not actually completely wrong (actually it’s almost entirely correct) but wrong in trivial ways.

Baker finds all kinds of annoying tics and quirks in his Kindle, and he’s probably right. But these aren’t arguments against the eBook per se, or even the future of the Kindle, just against buying one right now. 

The Kindle 2 has a better and richer greyscale screen, but it’s still a bit wishy-washy. And the contrast could be better. There are also some reports about the sun incompatibility.

But these will no doubt be resolved when we get the Kindle 3.  

More important right now is that beyond the technical limitations, there’s the problem of stock. Not everything in print is available in electronically.

This will improve over time, but the limitation is purely technical. Amazon want you to use the Kindle and nothing else. So the stuff you buy from them can’t be viewed on your Sony Reader.

They also want you to buy all your material from them (and it’s the content that’s ultimately where the big bucks are going to be made). The problem with that is that all those guys putting up the Great Works into the public domain (Wikipedia editing for highbrow types) are wasting their time as far as your Kindle goes.

If you want a book, you’ll have to wait for Amazon to make it available for you.

(Baker has a neat solution: download stuff from the net and read it on your iPhone.)

One of the main objections to the devices is more emotional than rational. People just like holding books.

But what about other media?

Newspapers have as much nostalgia value as Penguin Classics. Maybe even more – there’s nothing like a lazy Sunday drinking good coffee under a tree reading the morning papers.

But the internet is largely making this experience obsolete anyway. Whether it’s breaking news, analysis or lifestyle journalism, you’re more likely to be reading your news on Firefox than print.

The Kindle, especially the Kindle DX, is great browsing for your local paper – or, better, someone else’s local paper – while reclaiming some of the casualness of holding a page. And you can read it in the park.

The big surprise, then, is that the eBook might just provide a sanctuary of old school reading habits in the age of advanced technology.

Tags: books, ebook, gadget, geekery, kindle, novels