Thoughts on Amazon’s Kindle
I don’t have an Amazon Kindle so I really can’t comment intelligently on the device, but I just wanted to press down some thoughts on the subject.
There have been alot of good comments and some bad, mainly about the device’s design. Some claim that this device is ushering in a new era of reading, some claim that it will never replace the book. I don’t know whether or not this device will be the preferred method of consuming the written word in the future, but something tells me that books are still going to be around for a very long time.
The people who tout Kindle as the next big thing tend to use the iPod alot in their arguments. They say what the iPod did for music, Kindle will do for books, but I disagree. What is the great thing about iPods and books? portability. I could be wrong about this, but I believe portable music has only been around in the mainstream since about the early 80’s with the advent of the “boom box” and other smaller tape players, so I believe that we were still primed and ready for a device like the iPod to arrive and disrupt the market when it came out. The iPod serviced a need and that was to have more music available at your side, this was something that everyone wanted. Music differs from the printed word in the fact that it can be consumed at much larger amounts without much thinking, so having a large amount of music with you at all times makes sense.
Now let’s talk about books. First off, the book as we know it today is already portable. I would make the argument that the majority of people out there do not want to have 200 novels with them at their side wherever they go, perhaps maybe students and teachers would want this, but not your average consumer. Reading is also a much more time and brain consuming task, so you’re only ever really going to want to be reading one book at a time, at least I feel this way.
I don’t say this with any pride, but overall reading levels are down…way down and I don’t think it’s going to get any better. Technology is speeding information up at astounding rates, information is being fed to us in bite size chunks all over the place, this is still a relatively new occurance right now but in another 50 years it will be considered as norm. For this fact I don’t see the future of the book as getting any brighter, therefore I don’t see why a device like Amazon’s Kindle makes much sense. I’d like to end this post on an slightly naive and optimistic note and say that I applaud Amazon and their commitment to a device like this, if they do say they want to try and get more people out there reading, that’s great and I wish them well, but something tells me this device was released for other reasons.