Jeff Bezos, in a whopping seven-page Newsweek cover story, is claiming that the world is coming to an end era of the eBook is finally being ushered in thanks to Amazon's Kindle. Using electronic ink to simulate real paper, this e-reader is paperback weight and size but can store around 200 books or a combination of novels, newspaper subscriptions and blogs. Because it can use 3G - on the bundled Sprint SIM card - as well as WiFi it's even easier to download books at any time.
Some consumers appear to be convinced. The US-only $399 device sold out in under 6 hours. Head over the jump for a roundup of what the blogs are saying, and cast your vote here.
Stuart Dredge over at Tech Digest is wondering whether those buyers are just people who long ago gave up books for RSS feeds and already have plenty of mobile ways of ingesting the written word. TechCrunch is saying it's bringing eBooks to the fore despite being, frankly, fugly. But Boing Boing Gadgets, despite being excited by some features, is disappointed by the clunky navigation, dirt-attracting colour and limited supported file types - no PDFs, for example. And Engadget's noting the oddity that you should have to pay a 99 cent subscription to read blogs, which are freely available on other mobile devices.
Personally, I have a large library and am struggling to carry and store books everywhere I go, so in theory I'm totally the right candidate for the Kindle or a device just like it (I lean towards some of the more elegant readers like the Iliad and Sony's). But I find I just can't give up the feeling, the experience and yes, the smell, of reading from real paper. Yes, I feel somewhat bad about the use of a natural resource where a virtual one is available, but I suspect the manufacture and discarding of electronic devices is a lot more damaging to the environment than paperbacks made of a proportion of recycled paper.
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I appreciate computers, I truly do;
they're incredibly useful, allow me to work anywhere (I'm in language services), open up a whole world... hell, they'd be worth it for the whole insanely extensive/often questionable glut of wikipedia alone.
On the other hand, I adore books.
They're reasonable, they're portable, they survive violent accidents and remain usable. They are history. Many are well worth preserving.
The idea of a small electronic device replacing books altogether is disturbing; then again, for those items that one is likely to bin/abandon after one [partial] reading... well, this sounds perfect. I'm just wondering - should this trend take off - how it would impact the availability and cost of books over time.
I completely agree with you on the smell and feel of paper when reading a book. I do a lot of blogging and spend hours on the computer at work anyway. When I want to curl up with a book and give my eyes a rest, I don't want another solid gadget that I can't move around too much to get the best angle to read at if I feel like lying on my side. (I have tested this out with my laptop. No go.)