I Want a Kindle! Wait, No I Don’t! Wait, Yes I Do!
Me: We should buy a Kindle.
Me 2: What, that ugly dull-gray slab of plastic? What the fuck for?
Me: It’s cool.
Me 2: Oh, that’s subpar even for you. You’ll have to do better than that.
Me: Okay, smartass. It’s a revolution in reading. We can carry thousands of books around with us at any one time.
Me 2: Okaaaay…but we can only read one at a time. Right? Or did we purchase a new set of eyes recently?
Me: Oh, like we don’t walk around Seattle with 10 lbs. of books strapped to our back on any given day.
Me 2: Yes, but when you drop a book, nohing happens to it. You drop a Kindle, and you lose those thousands of books.
Me: I would never drop my Kindle!
Me 2: Need I remind you that we’re the same person who dropped our new Palm Pilot within two days of purchase?
Me: You had to bring THAT up…
Me 2: Or remind you what happened to our Dell MP3 player? Or the five cell phones we had prior to our current craptastic model?
Me: Look, you’re missing the bigger picture (as usual). Thousands of titles, instantly accessible over a fee-free cellular link. Think of all of the paper that saves!
Me 2: Ah, the environment. All right, point awarded for tree-hugging.
Me: And wouldn’t it be cool, whenever we needed something to read, to download it in under a minute? Without paying the penalty of forced interaction with other human beings?
Me 2: All right, your appeal to my darker instincts has not fallen on deaf ears. Let’s bring this thing up on Amazon’s site and see what…um, hello? It costs $250?!
Me: It’s an investment.
Me 2: In what, the greenbacks used to stuff Jeff Bezos’ mattress?? Let’s see what the Internet says about that…
Me: Since when are you so concerned with what the Internet thinks?
Me 2: Since you want to spent $250 of my money on a dead-tree replacer, that’s since when. Hmmm, here’s one of the Most Ironic Moments of 2009 – after Kindle customers downloaded 1984 from Amazon, the company deleted it from their devices without their consent. So much for ownership of digital content, right?
Me: Not fair – Bezos himself admits that was stupid. Besides, it was an illegal copy. Should customers be allowed to keep books they have no right to own?
Me 2: But that’s the thing – you don’t own any of these books. Like Cory Doctorow says:
They say that when you buy an ebook or an audiobook that’s delivered digitally, you are demoted from an owner to a licensor. From a reader to a mere user. These thieves deliver our digital books and our audiobooks wrapped in license agreements and technologies that might as well be designed to destroy the emotional connection that readers have with their books.
Me: That’s a bit hysterical. Plus, it hurts my feelings.
Me 2: Suck it up, buttercup. Holy hell – you can’t even share books with other Kindle users? At least Barnes & Noble’s contraption lets you lend out books to other Nook readers. Why don’t you want a Nook instead?
Me: Nook’s not even available yet. They were supposed to have it out by Christmas, now it’s not hitting until January. You want to invest in a company that can’t ship its hardware on schedule?
Me 2: Okay, look – I’m vetoing this. It’s expensive, it’s Orwellian, and it’s early-adapter. What’s wrong with carting around physical books for a few more years? Besides, you know that if we get this, we’ll never use the library again. We’ll spend ten times more on books than we’d normally waste. Which I guess is great for the authors we love, but not for our bank balance.
Me: So…no fucking way?
Me 2: No fucking way.
Me: How about we get an iPod Touch instead?
Me 2: Okay, but only if we load it up with DRM-free MP3s from Amazon.
Me: Deal.
Writer and father of four in Seattle, WA. It is my dream to be a professional smartass. Until then, I'm working pro bono.
I saw a woman at the gym the other day who was reading from it while on the treadmill. Didn’t seem all that exciting to me. Oh yeah, she was reading the bible on it too which I found… weird. Jesus’ word has gone high tech now I guess.
And I love the smell of library books too much to give it up.
Great article. You are right about the spending too much on book downloads (although freebies are available).
For what it’s worth, I got one at Christmas. It’s so close to what I wanted it to be, it hurts. Not unlike the first 128K Mac; you can clearly see this is a big step but it doesn’t quite pull it off. I’d compare the current Kindle as the 2-floppy 256K Mac. Useable but still not there.
Kindle software has improved, you can download and read PDF’s directly (but get the bigger one for that; wish I had. The standard screen is too small for most PDF’s to be easily legible). You can read at least some non-Amazon ebooks as well. More if you don’t mind going through your computer to do it. You can also back up to a local computer and (if so inclined) the current Digital Restriction Management system can be broken.
My rationalization was the many many PDF manuals my job requires and the many thick techno books I lug around but frankly a laptop can do that OK as long as I don’t need to read more than 15 minutes at a time and several of the thick books I want are still only available in paper.
On the plus side, there is a semi-usable web browser handy for onestopaway.org (Bus arrival times updated with actual data) and the like and since it has a largish screen and doesn’t need wifi, I find myself using that.
The iSlate (if it happens) or the Nook (after more software updates) or the Sony or something else may end up being significantly better. BTW: I personally tend to give companies a little slack on ship dates. If it’s a month or 2 late anyway.
This is going to be an interesting ride. Not as big a deal as the printing press but maybe as big a shift as going from scrolls to codexes (although come to think of it the early presses couldn’t have handled scrolls easily). I don’t think the Kindle is “it” but it’s definitely a stop along the way to the right thing.
My husband bought me one for Christmas – he had no idea what to buy me at all, so, since I love to read, he bought that. It’s ok. I’m reading a book on it now, and the pro is that I could read it instantly – as soon as I finished #2 in the series, I was on to #3. I do think it will be convenient for travel, because I always seem to read everything before the end of the trip and need to run to the store to buy something.
I just don’t know, though – I really LOVE books.