Danny Westneat’s rave review with reservations and my pal Paul Andrews’s more scathing piece about Amazon’s new e-book device (the latter admittedly written without having seen the machine in person) both refer to the old, tired meme of “The Book.”
This meme, which I’ve bashed before, can be divided into two arguments; both of them, I believe, are specious.
First, Andrews reiterates that chestnut argument I’ve been hearing my entire adult life, that nobody reads anymore (particularly those vidiot kids guilty of not being From The Sixties); thus, The Book, and with it all capacity for rational intelligence, has become the refuge of a small literate elite just like in pre-Renaissance days.
Second, both Andrews and Westneat trot out the notion that there’s something sacred about The Book, something that will never, can never, be equalled by any electronic device imaginable; and even if it could, hardcore “people of the book” (especially the older male ones) are, by nature, proud Luddites, who’d rather be living in some imagined pre-20th-century pastoral Eden.
Andrews cites a recent National Endowment for the Arts study claiming that “reading for pleasure” among adults has dropped bigtime since the mid-’90s. Actually, all “legacy media” have dropped bigtime in popularity, from broadcast TV/radio to newspapers and magazines to movies in theaters. The culprits: DVDs, video/computer games, them danged Interwebs, and more active leisure pursuits such as gyms.
And if book buyers really were such technophobes, Amazon wouldn’t have made its first market niche from them.
Folks “read for pleasure” on screens all the time these days. You’re probably doing so right now.
The catch is that Internet-based reading has, to date, emphasized short-form content, such as that featured in this splendiferous web-column thingy.
The trick has been to devise an environment that facilitates/encourages long-form reading; i.e. single book-length texts.
That’s what all the developers of specialized e-book reader machines have strived for this past decade or so. From what I’ve read about Kindle (I haven’t seen one in person either), they’re still not there yet.
But that doesn’t mean it’ll never happen.
I can foresee something a little bigger than the iPhone or a little smaller than a Tablet PC, running open source software or at least non-encrypted file formats, that’s pleasant enough on the eyes for extended reading times, and which enables the total immersive feel of burying oneself in a good tale.
Further updates still: According to the SeaTimes’s Brier Dudley, Amazon didn’t develop the Kindle hardware here but in Silicon Valley. And Amazon indeed ignored the Seattle media at Kindle’s launch, not even inviting anybody from here to its big debut presentation in NYC.
