CON GAMES: Kindle Me Too

May 22nd, 2009 at 06:47am Michael Conniff 2

Okay, it’s official: the bound and tattered book is dead.

For me at least.

I know the book is dead because when my Kindle 2 broke (my bad) I had to go ten days without it and ink-and-paper books made for a clumsy, lumbering substitute. I know this is heresy but so was the personal computer, the Web, and the cell phone. Heresy is now doctrine and you don’t need another falling newspaper tree to see it coming. Tell the truth, the only things I can see wrong with the Kindle 2 is that it’s black-and-white and you can’t use it in the rain. Otherwise, as a brain-feeding device it is seriously superior to anything in print that has come before.

There’s the sheer convenience. The New York Times downloads to my Kindle automatically every day and The New Yorker does so every week (for just $2.49 per month). Fantastic. With the device you can buy books with a single click from the Amazon Kindle store, and the Sprint wireless network is always on unless you say otherwise. You can download books—265,000 in the database—and sometimes they are cheaper than the print versions. One important wrinkle: you can adjust the size of the font size up and down and that’s crucial. The battery lasts all day and beyond.

Perhaps most important of all: you can carry all these newspapers and magazines books around without lugging the weight of the material with you. Those of you (like me) who have lived life burdened by the weight of knowledge will feel light as a feather.

You can do a few other things on the Kindle 2 that are still of secondary importance: you can “clip” and “mark” stories and sections you like and you can annotate the text with the cute little keyboard that’s part and parcel of the Kindle. You can search text and use a dictionary that comes with the device. You can also get on the Web though the command is still sequestered in the “Experimental” sections.

There’s something else going on here that is borderline profound. Because the Kindle presents all material in much the same way, the packaging and presentation of the cover and book diminish drastically in importance. The only thing left is the text—good, bad, and ugly—because the wrapper has all but disappeared on a level playing field. Words matter, and these words have to stand and fall on their own.

Nothing’s perfect—wireless reception can be spotty where I live—and you should make sure you should buy a portfolio from Aspen that protects your Kindle at all times because it can be fragile. But these are quibbles. Long live the Amazon Kindle and all generation-next attempts to re-invent reading on any and all electronic devices. I have seen the near-future and it works near to perfection.

Entry Filed under: Technology, Books, Con Games

4 Comments Add your own

1. Sue Gray | May 26th, 2009 at 8:35 pm

In defense of old fashioned books:

One of life's little pleasures is browsing a used book store for unknown treasures. Some of the best books I've ever read I didn't even know existed until I ran across their intriguing covers in a used bookstore. Somehow I don't think browsing Amazon for downloads will give me as much of a thrill.

Do I really want to subject my eyes to more strain and my cells to more electronic radiation? I get enough radiation surfing the Internet and working from my computer.

And what's to become of bookmarks? I love bookmarks! And public libraries? And librarians!

I think there are enough people like me to keep the paper book alive for awhile. And if not, if books are going to become extinct, well maybe I ought to start collecting as many as I can now. Rare objects increase in value over time.
2. Mitch Mulhall | May 26th, 2009 at 9:45 pm

Sue-This reminds me of an old Ron White bit. His dog Sluggo takes a legendary dump, and in it there's what looks like a glove. Since he can't read shit without his glasses, White goes to the house to get his bifocals. Sure enough, the inscription on the wristband says, "Huntington Municipal Golf Course."

Turns out, Sluggo found a golf glove on a nearby golf course and ate it whole.

As White tells it, he rinsed the glove off and has been using it ever since.

Being green is nothing compared to being brown.

Whooof!

Cheers,
3. Michael Conniff | May 27th, 2009 at 6:40 am

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Sue. I too love the smell of coffee (and napalm) with the local paper in the morning. But I have just read two books on the Kindle 2--one by Bill Russell and another about Roger Clemens--and I've been reading the latest New Yorker (delivered wirelessly) and The New York Times every day. It's the words (and pictures and accounts) that count and nothing else. I can't tell you how sick I am of hearing yet another person talk about the wonders of print. Print is a pain in the ass! I couldn't possibly carry all of the above with me every day--no way--and the convenience is absolute. Not to mention the ability to order books, new and old, online. The browsing you so love is available in spades in the Amazon Kindle 2 store.

I get it--I'm of your generation after all--but with devices like the Kindle 2 cropping up there's no longer the need to bemoan the loss of something because we've got something better. When was the last time ANYONE bemoaned the appearance of network television clips on the Web? The point is convenience and distribution. It's the same animal (for now) wherever you find it.

Don't be color-blind: it's all there in black and white.

Best, MIchael!
4. Sue Gray | May 27th, 2009 at 8:07 am

Mitch, Thanks for the story. I concur that treasures can be found in the middle of a pile of shit, and in the case of used book stores, one person’s shit is another’s treasure.

Michael, maybe you missed my point. If you know what you want to read and it’s a current publication available on Kindle, great. But so much of what I read doesn’t come off the best seller list. Haven’t you ever “discovered” a book purely by circumstance? Sometimes the book you would never actively seek out, the one that just falls in your lap, is the one that changes your life. That can’t happen with Kindle.

By the way, don’t you find it interesting that the word Kindle denotes fire? Farenheit 451 comes to mind. I wonder if that was deliberate.