At her Accidental Futurist blog, Kate O’Hare writes:
Last year, I spent some time on Twitter musing about whether or not I should buy a Kindle to accompany me on a cross-country plane trip. In the end, I decided that it was just too pricey (this was before the smaller, lower-priced ones came out) and opted for audio-books downloads instead.
That worked fine, but when I came back, a kind pal gave me a Kindle DX — that’s the big one — as a gift.
AdvertisementI now read books. Old books. New books. Lots of books.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I didn’t read books before. I have always been a voracious reader and, in my time, have plopped down untold amounts of cash in bookstores and on Amazon.com.
But the way I read books is different now.
I tried getting books from the library. One was on a list, but when I finally got it, it proved to be a dense tome and had to be read slowly. I couldn’t finish it in time, and since it was on a list, the library wouldn’t let me renew it.
That’s the last time I went to the library. I put this book on my Kindle for a very low price (it wasn’t a new release), so nobody can tell me how fast I have to read it.
Facing a long train ride but not wanting to spend a whole pile of money, I took advantage of the many free books available for Kindle download. I went the American-history route and got “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” “The Federalist Papers (Optimized for Kindle),” Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America, Volume 1 & Volume 2.”
Then, for fun, I threw on “Pride & Prejudice” and the complete works of William Shakespeare.
For very nominal fees, I’ve added a couple of Bibles, a pile of Oscar Wilde and “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.”
And that’s only a fraction of the classic works available for Kindle (and, one assumes, for Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the iPad and other devices) at low or no cost.
I’m increasingly liking the concept behind the Kindle, though I have mixed emotions about the actual physical Kindle device itself. But the ability to read a book anywhere, and carry the digital equivalent of a massive stack of them onto an airplane via my Kindle, laptop or Android Tablet is pretty darn nifty. Not to mention the prospect of freeing up space on my overflowing bookshelves. As is the ability, at least on my PC or laptop, to cut and paste text from a book into a blogpost rather than have to physically put a book into a scanner and OCR the whole thing, as I’ve done for a few blog posts. And pray that a word doesn’t become gobbledygook somewhere in the translation process.
For a more Luddite point of view, naturally enough, we turn to the L.A. Times, for an article whose arguments are quite similar to those made when physical newspapers began to lose out to the Internet. As James Lileks said in one of the Ricochet podcasts a while back, everybody longs for that nostalgic Annie Hall-like feeling of having the Sunday New York Times spread out alongside the bagels and orange juice on the kitchen table. Or as Marshall McLuhan once quipped, “People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.”
Similarly, I think everybody has that feeling of buying a book (or taking it out of the library), bringing it home, and taking it outside on a sunny day to become utterly absorbed in it. Perhaps that tactile feeling is lost or greatly diminished with the Kindle, but the flexibility it provides offsets it in many ways.
Of course for that reason, perhaps books are about to become luxury items, given at birthdays and at Christmas, the equivalent of giving someone an expensive necktie or sweater. Or these days, a compact disc, for that matter.
Related: The London Independent wonders if the home library will become a casualty to the Kindle, which is one of their less preposterous predictions.
Related: The dead tree equivalent of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, or life imitates the ending of Fahrenheit 451.
I’m tempted. I own a lot of books. There are books in every room of my home. Old Books, some very old, new books, serious books and BigMacBooks.
However, based on my experiences with music and movies, I do wonder if every time the technology changes, will I have to buy the same title all over again?
If the past performance of Amazon is any indication–and it probably is in this case–future Kindles will be able to use the same books old Kindles did. I just upgraded from a Kindle 2 to a Kindle 3 a couple of months ago and have had no issues. I also use Kindle for PC and Kindle for Android, and they pull the same books from my Amazon digital library with no problems.
So, while Amazon COULD change formats on us, they’d be upsetting a very large portion of their customer base… and Amazon seems to do their best to avoid doing that most of the time (a couple of regrettable incidents notwithstanding).
But… books were always luxury items: that is why Public Libraries were such a necessity. And it was the expense of buying a new copy that caused books of all kinds to be preserved rather than discarded into ash heaps. Many 18th, 19th and early 20th century books have multiple inscriptions – there was no stigma in giving a second-hand book as a birthday or Christmas gift.
While costs have consistently fallen with growing markets and increasingly affluent populations, it was really only within the last century, thanks to technological developments, that books became so inexpensive that a paperback could be thrown away after one reading, and even the poorest could afford to amass a library.
The main concern I have with digital books is the same as that with digital news: the continual edits never show, and can be changed after one may have cited a passage elsewhere. There are times and instances where, yes, we really do need to know what the first edition said.
There is another concern, that digital books cannot be easily shared, but that is a concern for another thread.
My husband and I probably own upward of 2000 books. And then there’s my Kindle. I have many beloved books that I’m happy to have in paper form, some are falling apart and I intend to replace them, in paper form. And then there’s my Kindle. For me, the Kindle has put the fun back in reading. I can download samples of books that seem interesting, books that people have said are good, books that are recommended by Amazon. And then, when I feel like reading, and have the time to read, I can just go through them. I’ve been saved from spending money on books that didn’t hold my interest after 3 chapters, and ‘discovered’ authors I might not have paid attention to otherwise. I’m currently going through Dickens (all of his works would take a lot of shelf space!) And when it comes to some of the mysteries and thrillers that I love, I don’t have to figure out how to get rid of them when I’m done with them. Both paper and electronic books have their place and I’m very grateful for the feast!
At the moment a lending library is established for Kindles I’ll buy one in a nanosecond; that lending library arrangement doesn’t even have to be free, just cheap enough compared to buying the book (in either paper or electronic version) to make it worthwhile.
Some books I want to own, some I don’t. I get current fiction from the library, read it and return it, only sometimes purchasing a copy; books of more lasting value I buy and keep. Example: I picked up Clancy’s latest – “Against All Enemies” from my reserve list at the library Thursday, read it over the weekend, and will return it Monday. Amazon sells the hardcover for $15.39, Kindle for $14.99 (the $9.99 paperback won’t be out until 1/2012). It’s pop fiction, and not a book I’d want to keep, so a “free” library loan (paid for from my property taxes, which I’ll have to pay whether or not I buy the book or borrow it) makes more sense in my situation. A “Kindle Renting Arrangement” for $1-$2 would work in place of a library loan, but I’m not sure how publishers could differentiate between a short term convenience rental and just keeping it on the device. Amazon has demonstrated that it has the ability to remotely modify content in a customer’s Kindle – which raises a whole new batch of concerns – so maybe something along the lines of an extremely cheap 30-day e-rental might work, or perhaps a “rent with option to buy” option if you decide you want to own it during/after reading it; for example, I bought Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon” after reading a library copy.
Dear Fred,
Your wish has been heard, and your wish has been granted.
I look forward to welcoming you to the Kindle family.
The Kindle is definitely good news for me. One especially addictive feature is the on-line dictionary, which you actually start to miss when reading a paper book. (What exactly does “sedulous” mean, or “perspicuous?” Where is Mauritania, again?)
The home library goes into the cloud. I am now used to deleting a book when I’m done with it: it doesn’t vanish, it goes into the cloud and I can get it back anytime I like because it’s mine.
The ability to sample, and absurd bargains like the “Summa Theologica” for something like $2, not to mention the Magic Catalog from Gutenberg (absolutely free all the way) — I think most Kindles are carrying around more stuff than the owner will ever be able to read. It’s superb for travelling as well.
I think the wonderful thing about the Kindle and other e-readers is the same point Ms. O’Hare made; the fact that so many books are available for free offers one a chance to read many of the great authors from the past, that one would not necessarily have read otherwise, because they are free. In doing so I have found that style and literary ability have suffered greatly in our times, that much of what is said today was said already and said much better. I’ve also downloaded most of her suggestions as well as the complete works of Dickens, Austen, Doyle, Dumas (whose Three Musketeers I happily found to be a series of about six books),
Hugo, Dostoevsky, etc. Really, after reading these I find it painful to read most contemporary authors, especially authors of fiction.
I don’t have a Kindle but I have Kindle for PC. The ability to adjust font size and single/dual columns is fabulous. A lot of the older stuff and some of the new are available for $0.99 or $1.99. The nearest good book store is about an hour away.