Mar 02 2009
Praise My Kindle
God gives life and Charles C. gives us Kindle. We received it as a surprise gift and love it from then on.
I was just thinking the other day after struggling with a hardcover book, “Five thousand years of human civilization later, is this the best reading experience we can come up with?” Here is a list of my problems:
- You can’t use ball pen to mark on a book while lying on the bed
- A beautifully bond book is the hardest one to keep open (to read, to write on, etc.)
- You don’t want to dog-ear or write on borrowed or rented books
- Books tend to have to small a margin
- You can underline, write all you want in a book, it is still a pain in the ass to look up anything you remembered as “somewhere in the book”.
- Books are heavy
The most important thing Kindle offers is a much superior reading experience: the book is light, you can order content at any time from almost anywhere (anywhere has a Sprint-competible wireless network, that is). The printing technology (the device is much more like a miniture printer behind a wipeable slate than a LCD display) make it very easy on the eyes. Another feature we like the most is that it allows you to send your content (in Word, text or HTML format only) to your Kindle.
Of course, there are things I would like in future versions, e.g. so far, all the contents are of the same font. It cannot handle the pictures embedded in a block of text in the original print. The device is super light yet not the most ergonomic to hold for a long time. So far, Kindle only supports 240K titles and many of the academic ones are not yet available.
But for $395, which includes all the wireless bills incurred forever, this is an incredible piece of machine that will change many people’s lifes, particularly those poor graduate students (I felt like someone just died before they came up with Penicilline). I am saying so with some confidence too. Bezos revealed on Charlie Rose that in the 14 month Kindle has been on the market, Amazon has sold 1/10 of the books on it already. WOW!
I wanna have a Kindle too! But $395 is still expensive for an unemployed graduate student~
P.S. I’m going to Vancouver during the spring break. Do you need anything?
Bing
I wish I could could get excited about the Kindle. Yet despite your fine summary of the benefits of digitalized text, after looking at a computer screen for 10+ hours a day my preferred bedside reading remains the the book.
And then there\’s the experience of walking past the bookshelf and being tempted to pick up a volume read years earlier for a quick browse.
I\’m also stuck on the book as an aesthetic object. In this case take music as the precedent. Remember the 33\" LP, the pleasure of listening to an album (already obsolete in this sense of the word) while perusing the liner notes and cover art suitable for framing? Then shrunk to the CD jewel case insert, and now one is reduced to trolling through amazon.com for cover art, members of the band, etc. My parable for the kindle experience…..though I too no doubt will be seduced by the new thing in time.
Yes I feel some qualms about tree-eating ramifications of my book/magazine/newsprint consumption which I attempt to offset by patronizing the library.