Kindle
There has been a few attempts at an eBook in recent times, Sony’s Reader is perhaps the best known example, and now Amazon have sold out the first release of Kindle.
No, I didn’t buy either one nor do I think I am likely to. I am comfortably wedded to paper books even though I admit the web has displaced almost all of my magazine and newspaper reading. The experience of reading a book is for me, still something I prefer to some plastic electronic replacement. I am willing to bet a large number of people agree with me.
In fact the whole culture of books is something which enriches my life and the lives of many people in the world. I buy books, everywhere, in bookshops, online, at garage sales and in transit lounges. People give me books, I give other people books, I can go to a library and borrow books, I can share something about a book with someone else and we can argue about books. Books have been with mankind for a long time.
As we know, the modern book became accessible to the average punter with the arrival of the Gutenberg press which was later hitched up to the machines of the early industrial revolution. There are some interesting parallels with the development of the world wide web but that’s another issue. The impact of books on human society is immense. If writing was a concept that sparked modern civilisation, then books helped to transform it into what we have today.
The history of books is in many ways inseparable from the history of humanity. Today the world is awash with books, books for entertainment, books for ideas, books for knowledge. The world wide web could stop tomorrow and I can still read a book. And that is the problem for me, with the eBook.
The book thing is utterly pervasive, books are everywhere. Even modern paperbacks last for a long time. They are easy to store and move around, they don’t require anything more than an ability to read and sufficient light to read by. Duplicating what is in a book electronically is convenient in a well connected world, but replacing it with only electronic versions has some serious drawbacks with regard to freedom of information and distribution of ideas.
So things like Kindle worry me a little especially when reviewers gush over the whiz bang technology and the convenience factors because these are the very things that consumerism is built on. Such enthusiasm reveals the profit agenda behind such inventions and unfortunately the larger the profit motive becomes, the more likely these things are to succeed (at least as far as making money). The potential larger ramifications get ignored or marginalised by the juggernaut of commercial success. Perhaps it will work out ok, who knows?
But until I see a hard drive that doesn’t die after some random event, or a cdrom that doesn’t mysteriously stop reading data somewhere or in fact any information storage device that doesn’t require anything more than light and an ability to read to unlock its contents, until that time I will stick to books, thanks all the same.