Amazon's Kindle

Check it, the new Kindle DX. Discalimer: I do not represent or am affiliated with Amazon in any way. I am, however, a humongous technophile and a reading geek. So, you can imagine how great this new Kindle is to me. In addition to holding thousands of pounds of books in a light, easy to carry little tablet, the thing also supports magazines, textbooks, and newspapers, all downloadable at your fingertips. Hooray for an alternative financial model for the dying newspapers! It also supports PDF files, and has nifty graphics in black and white. No color, but I imagine that it'll be something that Amazon will be unveiling sometime down the road.

Now. Let's be honest. At $489, this item is not cheap. And if you want your New York Times or subscription to The Atlantic or any books at all, those are all additional fees on top of the extraordinarily expensive Kindle. Older versions will cost you about $350, which is (relatively) reasonable, but honestly, what writer (unless you're Stephen King) has that kind of change to spare? What's intriguing about the whole concept of downloadable content and media (in book and text form) is the way it could potentially change the way books are consumed and read. An electronic version of a book, one that can be bought and downloaded in the matter of minutes, anywhere, very much supports the kind of impulsive and "on-demand" buying pattern that the Internet currently feeds for things like video games and software. Want it? Have a credit card? It's yours, right now. A good thing for books, I think, if they are advertised and supported properly. At the same time, the electronic format (and the linked Wall Street Journal article above touches on this) also promotes a different type of reading pattern that a good old fashioned piece of paper does not. It makes reading more fractious, promotes skimming rather than an attention to detail. You can see it in the way media online is currently consumed. When was the last time you've read something you were only half interested in line by line in an online article? My reading habits and strategies massively shift depending on what medium it is in. Online, I tend to read more quickly, skimming articles, websites, and pages for key phrases and nuggets. When I find something that interests me, or that requires deeper attention, do I finally stop and give a deeper reading. Otherwise, if it doesn't attract me, I pass it over, and ignore it. This, I imagine, will be exacerbated with cheap, on-demand e-media. If a book -- bought relatively cheaply -- is easily gotten, easily downloaded, and easily loaded, how much attention will it be given if it doesn't grab a reader from the first page? The first paragraph? Easily gotten, also easily abandoned and forgotten. I've always considered buying books from the store as entering into a kind of agreement: no matter how long it takes me to get to the book or how long to read, I'll eventually finish it. More than it being 10-15 dollars in price, a physical book is a kind of reminder, sitting on your desk or bookshelf or whatever, until you go and read it, where it then transforms into a different kind of reminder, a reminder of how good (or bad) your memories of that book were everytime you see it. An e-book cannot do this. An e-book, if you don't like it, can be closed and filed away electronically. It disappears, and there is no physical reminder of your book, unless you actively go and look for it again in the file menu.

Some interesting things to think about -- both bad and good. Even though I believe the physical format will never go out of style, I do think the electronic format is the future. Just look at the music industry.