Kindle review

8 comments on “Kindle review”

1. E_I says:
   March 11th, 2008 at 9:19 am

   Was it a review of the Kindle at all?

2. Degen says:
   March 11th, 2008 at 9:28 am

   I’ve loaded my comment about this story as a series of short documentaries on YouTube. Search for them with keywords: “boots” and “fetish”

3. Mark says:
   March 11th, 2008 at 2:04 pm

   I would love to own one of these digtal librarys with fx, and I’ll check out the website that was mentioned.
   I have a serial on Facebook, running for about 11 months now (irregularly) and although I knew other such things existed (such as,
   say, the “LOST,” T.V show’s marketing campagin, or any other interactive story interfaces), I had no real idea where to find them or info on them…..so good post there, George.

4. Mark says:
   March 11th, 2008 at 2:10 pm

   Oh, and I have never been to this site before….nd I see you have a comics pg. I’m excited.

5. George says:
   March 11th, 2008 at 2:24 pm

   Don’t get too excited until you’ve seen the art, Mark…… :)

6. Will Entrekin says:
   March 11th, 2008 at 7:44 pm

   Maybe I missed it, but I don’t see any supposition that sounds and images might replace text, merely supplement it. To say that anyone’s turning books into television or videogames seems a slippery slope, at best; why not use every available tool to tell a story? That the ebook might “become a new art form” doesn’t necessarily imply that it will do anything to diminish books as one.

7. Mark Thwaite says:
   March 12th, 2008 at 5:10 am

   I think Will has a point. We have to remember the displace not replace mantra. Ebooks might become a “new art form”, perhaps a dominant one (although I don’t see it), they’ll certainly displace some sales of some codex books, but mostly they’ll just become another supplementary media.

   As magazine publication did in Dickens’ day, Ebooks will change the form of novels read on them. But many will not want the form of novels changed and many will not want to read on a device. But it is non-fiction and technical books where an Ebook reader will be useful (for storing and searching) multiple texts. For fiction on the Ebooks the tendency will be for added effects which will leave many fiction readers looking for the quiet simplicity of a codex.

8. George says:
   March 12th, 2008 at 8:39 am

   For the record, and as you should know, more often than not I’m an early adopter of new technologies, and I’ve been downloading and reading ebooks on my computer for some time. I haven’t made the switch to an e-reader because I haven’t found one that meets my combination of requirements in taste and price. But as Mark notes, and I’ve said many times before, if they’re searchable and copy/pastable, I’ll be all over them for non-fiction and reference.

   That all said, I can’t help calling them as I see them: e”books” with integrated audio and video capability will give way to e”tv”, and as the wireless/bluetooth capability is added, e”internet”. This movement toward what people are calling The Singularity, with all technologies merging into one, could very well be the end of what we now think of as “reading”.

   Our world is now one where we change our needs to fit the technology. Cell phones get created for emergencies and use in war, and suddenly every ten year old needs to be reachable at all hours of the day. We develop more powerful computer hardware and our end user software gets more complex and loaded up with graphics to take advantage. We develop a pill that accidentally makes men hard and then create an illness called “erectile dysfunction” to sell it. Computer memory is made cheaper and cheaper so we think, why store a set of stereo instructions as memory-cheap text when we can make and post a video of a guy showing you how to set up the stereo?

   Right now books compete with TV and movies for the interest and hearts of those who love narrative. With this new technology, they will also have to compete for physical space. There’s nothing inherently wrong with TV or movies (I love both — I’m currently deep in Season 1 of Lost — a polar bear?!), but they are fundamentally NOT books.

   “Using every tool to tell a story” is what the early radio/tv/movies people did, and they created new art forms, new ways of telling stories. The difference is, the site of their art was completely removed from the site of the book’s art. My fear is this: as e-readers replace print texts, the competition will become one of real estate as well as interest. What we know as fiction, non-fiction and poetry will literally be bullied out of their own pages.

   Now I realize that dedicated readers like us will always make time for “books”, in whatever form they may take, and I realize that this may be part of an evolution with outcomes we can’t yet see, but without meaning to belittle the best of the audio and visual genres: do you see my point in decrying the way people are keen to co-opt what’s seen as the “intellectual” image of books, while designing towards more “popular” media like video and audio?

   If there’s indeed a “battle” to keep literature healthy and alive, it’s a battle for the popular masses, not the converted choir that reads book blogs. Creating a single piece of technology that will simultaneously fill the roles of stereo, tv, cinema, and book, is like throwing reading, arguably the most regularly difficult skill needed for any of the aforementioned media, down a dark hole.

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