November 29, 2007
PS
What no one seems to get through their thick skulls, even after untold millions of dollars have been wasted on the concept: PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN. Why is that so hard for someone as obviously smart as Jeff Bezos to accept? The reason the iPod took off is that music was never meant to be a “thing” in the first place. It was born as pure sound, and pure sound is what it has returned to. But books were always physical objects, and the printed book as a piece of technology has yet to be improved upon. And won’t. Certainly not by something that looks like a prop from Charlie’s Angels and has, are you ready, a whopping ONE typeface. For everything! Yay! For further explanation as to why this is doomed, go to Amazon’s own website and read Kindle’s Customer Reviews. Ouch. Caveat emptor!
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9 Responses to “PS”
A friend of mine and I were discussing e-books several years ago. We kept thinking of features to add to the new technology.
My friend suddenly had a brainwave. “Wouldn’t it be great if you could print out the pages and then have them bound somehow so you could hold it in your hand!”
I replied, “Yeah, they have that. It’s called a book.”
Oh, I just love it when I’m handed an opportunity to be contrary.
Chip Kidd bases his argument that “books are not like music” on a shaky comparison. Better, I suggest, to compare music with literature or narrative or — what the hey! — just plain stories. Stories (or narrative or literature) were told before they were written and read, and we made a pretty spectacular jump when we all finally got with the program and shifted from listening to decoding symbols set in stone or onto papyrus or paper. I don’t think that the shift from reading printed book-length text to reading extended text on a screen is a fraction so dramatic.
Now I say this as a person who has a very low tolerance for reading text displayed on-screen, but I bet you that ten years from now — no, make that five — I’ll be whiling away time reading ephemeral literature on some vastly improved version of the Kindle. And I’ll still be buying and reading lots and lots of books.
(P.S. An [off-sides] open question for Chip Kidd: I’m sure that you had nothing to do with the obvious cost-cutting decisions that were made with respect to Knopf’s production of the third volume of John Richardson’s great biography of Picasso, but why did the thick-skulled folk at Knopf prevail? It’s a splendid book about a great artist by a wonderful writer and researcher — a crowning achievement of Richardson’s career; why the cheap, shoddy production? I’d have paid twice the $40 list price for a book produced with greater care.
Or am I being the thick-skulled one here, and have costs really skyrocketed so much since the 1991 publication of the first volume by Doubleday? I expect that they have and that I am.
But I’m standing firm about that music/books analogy.)
Sheila, we all love it when you’re handed an opportunity to be contrary.
From my perspective as a medical librarian, ebooks are the best thing to come along since - well - ejournals. For people who view books and journals as information resources, their electonic availability is a godsend. In terms of my own reading preferences, I generally choose print over online, but how much does that have to do with the fact that I’m old? I think print media will be with us for some time, but I predict its steep decline over the next 10 years.
I’m in the middle on this one. I think the kindle is a spectacular dud aesthetically and am amused at the implications of it’s name. Something that could be chopped to splinters and used to start a fire. It is uninspiring.
BUT
that doesn’t mean someone won’t perfect this and that in as few as five years, as Sheila mentions, we will all be reading from a digital object that glows beautifully in our hands.
I’ll wait. I want them implanted right in my brain.
Oops. I just turned a page.
I’ve read some journalists and heard some podcasters saying that the kindle could be a great replacement for textbooks, ultimately decreasing the costs of books and tuition. Well, that would be great for all the english lit and j-school majors who read fine prose and text for four years to get their degrees, but for those of us who had textbooks with color diagrams and pictures in them (science/engineering majors), the Kindle is completely useless.
Hmmm, Vin . . . now I just wonder what flacks for the textbook publishing racket — pardon me . . . industry — are saying about the Kindle.
(It scares me even to think about what you must have shelled out for textbooks over the course of your medical — and pre-med — education.)
The students and residents I work with strongly prefer online medical textbooks to print. Kindle may not be right for scientific texts, but we’re sure to see a reader soon that is. I feel certain that textbooks in all disciplines will move almost entirely into the electronic realm over the next few years. Whether there will be a corresponding decrease in cost is not so certain (don’t get me started on publishers and licensing fees.)
Sheila–
Compared to the tuition, the books were a mere drop in the bucket!
Cindy–
I also prefer online medical (specifically radiology) sources. Google Scholar, Medcyclopaedia, and Medline are my most frequently used resources on a typical day. Not to mention the number of times Google Image Search saved me when I a was on-call as a resident and fellow (and not infrequently as an attending.)