Kindle: Warm Spark or Destructive Fire?

I’m the kind of person who wanders around a bookstore picking up books just to feel them. I love to open a book that’s never been opened, to run my fingers over the virgin pages. Let’s be honest: I cuddle books. I caress them, I stroke them, I breathe in their inky perfume. Eventually I take them home and make them my pets.

I never feel lonely if there are piles of books in every room. In my comfy chair by the fire, I am perfectly happy just gazing sideways at my bookshelf, admiring the various titles and fonts, the colors of the dustjackets, the publishers’ symbolic logos on the spines. I can wallow for hours in happy anguish over which book to start next. At some point, I choose one. After consuming every word on the dust jacket, examining the front matter and table of contents, and leafing through a few pages, I finally begin to read. And for a short time, all’s right with the world. Or should I say without the world.

So reading for me is an experience of physical comfort as well as intellectual stimulation and emotional contentment--all provided by a handful of compressed wood pulp covered with tiny black symbols. It’s hard to imagine the pleasure of reading without the book itself, or with another kind of “book,” something with a different form and feel—say a small plastic box with a screen. Horrors! part of me thinks. That’s not a book! It doesn’t look like a book, feel like a book, smell like a book, or quack like a book. I can’t read that! What’s the world coming to?

If you ask Jeff Bezos, creator of amazon and of the new electronic reader Kindle, what the world’s coming to is a revolution that will change not just the form of books, but their readers, writers, and publishers and the processes they use to create and consume books. And that change will come about—indeed, is already underway—without sacrificing most of the traditional book’s beloved qualities.

Bezos wanted Kindle to be as “bookish” as possible. It’s the size of a paperback (no matter how many pages it has), it doesn’t plug in (except for recharging), and it doesn’t talk to you. You can curl up in bed with it. You can write in the margins. Yet it’s not physical characteristics like these that define a book, says Bezos; “the key feature of a book is that it disappears.” Like the storybook frames that usher us into the old Disney cartoons and then disappear once we’re inside the magic kingdom, a book is only the vehicle that propels us into another world. A book “takes you down the rabbit hole,” is the way he puts it. And the pleasure of that fall, he says, is what makes us love the physical book—not the other way around. So he’s betting we can come to love another package that can deliver the same rush.

Especially when that package does so many things the traditional book or bookstore can’t, starting with acquisition: With Kindle you can order and immediately GET an entire book on literally the spur of the moment. That’s because of Kindle’s built-in wireless connection to the internet, which also enables you to instantly look up reviews, definitions, and background information. It’s accessible from anywhere, says amazon. (Some Kindle readers in remote places have found otherwise.) Kindle books are cheaper than paper ones: new books are $10, older ones less. Kindle also has an email component, so you can chat with friends about the books you’re reading. It even saves your place automatically. And for students, researchers, or just book-hogs like me who can’t get on a plane without at least four books, it offers a way to carry hundreds of books in a “suitcase” the size of one. You can highlight favorite passages, search any book for a name or phrase, and even change the font size. And Kindle’s not just for book-length reading; you can subscribe to newspapers, magazines, and blogs as well. Kimdle users praise the ink-on-paper-like appearance of the text. And, as one reader said, “you don't have to fight to hold it open while eating a sandwich.”

What’s the down side of Kindle, besides not being a real book? The most obvious is that most books aren’t available, though amazon offers more than 90,000 books, including most current best sellers. (Bezos’s vision is that in five years, every book ever written will be available.) And you can’t lend out or resell the books you buy. Depending on which source you read, you may or may not be able to cut and paste passages you want to save. For me, Kindle’s instant connection to Wikipedia for reference is a drawback, since I prefer more trustworthy sources.

Still, the Kindle keeps calling my name, and eventually I will probably succumb to the temptation to have one. Based on user comments posted on amazon, I’ll wait for the next version and hope it has fewer kinks and a lower price. Because one thing is for sure: I might enjoy reading with a Kindle, but it won’t keep me out of bookstores.


For more information, see Steven Levy’s “The Future of Reading,” Newsweek, 11/26/07, http://www.newsweek.com/id/70983 and http://www.newsweek.com/id/71251. On amazon’s Kindle section, you can watch the Charlie Rose interview with Bezos and read thousands of user comments, including many that go beyond the practical and personal-preference issues to the philosophical questions raised by the technology and “DRM” (Digital Rights Management). Very thought-provoking.