Kindle Schmindle, Give Me a Book

Courtesy of Baby Got Books, I have been keeping abreast of the early reactions to Amazon's new e-book reader, The Kindle. I have to say that I'm not impressed.

I don't see where the improvement is. You never have to recharge a book, and if you accidentally leave your book on the subway, your entire library isn't gone. Books are too easy to be replaced like that. And that's what the makers of these products don't seem to get: Books are easy.

The way most technology gets sold to us is with the notion that it will make life easier. That tends to not be true once you scratch below the surface, but is true enough up front that everyone is willing to buy into it. And some things are an improvement. The vinyl record improved on the wax cylinder, and the 45s and 33s improved on 78s. There is still some debate over whether the warmth of vinyl is outweighed by the clarity of CDs, but that is a small point.

The only improvement that the Kindle can point to is capacity. Up to 200 books can be stored on one device. The problem is this: Do you really need to carry around 200 books all the time? And what happens if it is lost or stolen? Or the battery dies, which it inevitably will? Will they keep trying to sell you Kindle after Kindle? Of course they will. That's the Corporate American Way. There will be endless software updates and threats from hackers. If it is digital, somebody out there can figure out a way to get into it and fuck it up royal.

And this is, ultimately, the difference between The Kindle and the iPod. iPods are not dependent on you going to the iTunes Store. That is one possibility, but not the whole shooting match. I have almost 500 songs on my iPod and almost all of them, at least 99% were downloaded from CDs, not from iTunes. And while other people certainly have greater percentages of songs downloaded from Apple, they are not cornered into getting their content that way.

Maybe The Kindle will take off, although it's not looking so good right now. That's fine. The world is going to go its own way whether I like it or not. But I will stick with the humble book. It's a beautiful piece of technology, a small, wonderful thing that's easy to use, never needs updating, and works just as well outside the grid as in it.

And it's also compatible with my iPod. Take that, Kindle!