The Revolution Won’t Be Kindled
posted by Dave Hoffman
Several weeks ago, I received the Kindle 2 as a gift. It was a good gift, since it promised to solve an increasingly serious problem of shelf space in the house. Like Josh Marshall and Joseph Jacobson before him, the minimalism promised by the Last Book project is more than a little seductive. Alternatively, I just want Penny’s book from the Inspector Gadget cartoon.
The Kindle has exceeded expectations in some ways. Most particularly, it has significantly increased the rate at which I buy second-tier fantasy and sci-fi books. As I hadn’t appreciated before, the delay in receiving such books, and shelf-space opportunities lost, together constituted a serious barrier to me buying more than one or two a month. (I had thought it was a mix of quality and constraints imposed by my need to write. Not so!) I’ve bought and read around twenty or so books this month, and ran through them all like a bag of mindlessly eaten doritos. I’d add fantasy to romance authors as folks who ought to send a little thank you card to Jeff Bezos this year.
But it many other ways, the Kindle has disappointed. In this issue of the New Yorker, Nicholson Baker attacks the Kindle mercilessly, on grounds which resonate: (i) ill-named (”cute and sinister at the same time”); (ii) bad keyboard (”a restaurant accordion.”); (iii) bad screen (” a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray.”); (iv) bad catalog; (v) bad portability (”Nobody else’s hardware can handle Topaz without Amazon’s permission. That means you can’t read your Kindle books on your computer, or on an e-book reader that competes with the Kindle.”) But it’s an aspect of the reading experience he doesn’t mention that is particularly problematic.
The Kindle doesn’t reward – in fact it actively discourages – re-reading books. Part of that experience, at least for me, is linked to flipping through books for parts that were especially fun, or confusing, or interesting, and then diving in again. The Kindle, because it offers merely a continuous stream (you are 51% done, or you’ve completed 3400 of 5100 segments) doesn’t help to create the memory markers for those aspects of the book that are worth reliving.
Once you are done with a book on the Kindle, you never, ever, want to look at it again. You’ve absorbed the plot – it’s especially good, as Baker notes, at immersing you in plot-astic novels - but you haven’t gotten the artistry. And that’s why, I think, ultimately the Kindle (in its current form) isn’t going to destroy the book market. Reading on the Kindle is a materially inferior experience. And not just for law professors.
August 3, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books
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