Tue
28
Apr '09
- Steven Johnson of the Wall Street Journal writes a lengthy piece on the changes he believes e-readers like the Kindle will bring to books and reading. Johnson pulls no punches, claiming that
2009 may well prove to be the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.
- A few hundred miles from Wall Street, The Baltimore Sun blog “Read Street” offers 10 reasons to hate the kindles. Making the list: “I can’t use my collection of random bookmarks”, and my favorite, “The battery never dies on my paperback of The Big Sleep.” Follow the link for the full list.
- Over at “PC Magazine” (or is it PCMag now? I’m so un-hip), Lance Ulanoff offers a fairly level-headed and balanced list of 10 things you need to know about the Kindle. Or, at least level-headed until you get to #10:
E-books will kill books, publishing, and reading.
Did I say level-headed? My mistake.
- Venture capitalist Tom Alberg of Seattle reads the tea leaves differently. Instead of thinking that a Kindle will kill reading, he believes that Kindle could save the newspaper industry.
- So you could be reading the newspaper on a Kindle, but you’d be doing it all alone.
- Still, there’s comfort in reading even alone, right? Well, maybe not with a Kindle, according to Freida Marie Crump of the Journal News:
New books smell good. A Kindle smells like a telephone.
- Not that Amazon will care anyways. They’re making a killing off the Kindle, with Seeking Alpha estimating that before they even sell you the first book for your Kindle, Amazon has already raked in a 40% profit from just the sale of the device.
- Well, there’s always alternatives to the Kindle if you want to read e-books. For example, there’s Lexcycle, makers of Stanza, a cool desktop and iPhone application that allows you to download and read ebooks in multiple formats. Currently Stanza supports Adobe PDF, EPUB format, the XML-based standard format and support for Adobe’s eBook content protection technology, allowing you to purchase commercially published eBooks. So if you’re interested in e-books but not necessarily in Amazon’s Kindle you have optio–
Aww, crap.
Kindles are not going to be my bag of tea. I initially found the idea appealing because of the fact that they’re so light and portable. Then I realized that for the price of a Kindle, and the following prices of each book, etc. I would want would just not be worth it. Besides, I love the look and feel of an honest-to-goodness paperback. I like the covers, and I like seeing what other people are reading.
I like the smell of books. I like seeing them on my shelves. I like reading for hours on end without my eyes getting sore because I’m staring at what amounts to a computer screen. I also like my out-of-print editions of books that I read in junior high or high school, which can only be found by extensive scrounging around on the internet and in used bookstores.
I enjoy leafing through books for my favorite pages, and I love walking through a bookstore looking at covers, reading the blurbs on the back, and flipping through pages to see if the book I’m looking at is really something I want to read.
In short: I don’t ever want to resort to a Kindle for my reading. I love real books.