Now, I have been eyeing the Kindle since they were introduced a few years back. Portable book reader that does for books what the iPod did for music = good. A sticker price of $259 and no color display = bad. Also, there's the matter that Amazon insists on charging for e-books, which is okay so far as it goes, but I only have so much disposable cash. I have a sizable library of CDs that I can load onto my iPod. And while I have a small library of public domain books in .txt format (thank you Project Gutenberg), none of them are in Kindle format. So while I approve of the basic concept, the Kindle wasn't something I sat up nights plotting on how to get my hands on.
Fast forward to a couple of months ago. Apple, my gadget maker of preference, introduces the iPad; a sleek little piece of hardware that does everything a Kindle does, only in color, and with an iPod, web browser and some light laptop functionality thrown in for good measure. This = really good. A starting price of $499 = really bad.
Another point that shouldn't be lost in all of this is I like books. Not text files, not e-readers, but books. The codex format that the early Christians found so useful works just fine for me, venerable as it is. And in some ways, it's infinitely preferable. I would never take a $500 iPad into a hot bath on a Sunday afternoon, for example.
Nevertheless, when the e-mail from Amazon arrived, I finally decided to put a toe in the water. I downloaded the Mac version of the app (free), and almost as quickly, found a book on prayer by Phil Yancey (oddly enough, also free). Yancey is one of my favorite living Christian writers, and I'm still trying to figure out what one of his books is doing floating around on Amazon for free. Yet, there it was, on Amazon's top ten downloads list for $0.00.
And so, I find myself a few chapters into Phil Yancey's "Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?" — exactly 12 percent, as it happens (try judging that with a paperback). And so far, it's had a few differences from a regular book. For starters, it's a little too much like reading a web page. Instead of the satisfying flick of turning a page, I'm obliged to lightly draw my fingers against the trackpad to move on to the next section; not quite the sensory experience I'm used to. On the other hand, it remembers exactly how far I've gotten, so no more jagged bits of paper marking my place. There's also supposed to be a notes feature, which would be a little slice of fried awesome for some texts, but I haven't figured out how to make it work yet.
At the moment, it's a curiosity, and no more. I still think more than $250 for an e-book reader is too much. And even if I didn't, it would just be one more thing to carry. Too much cost, and not enough of a multi-tasker. So while I'm content to add Kindle functionality to my MacBook Pro, I can't begin to justify spending the money to get what would be the coolest thing about it — to be able to take a library of books around with you on a hand-held device a little smaller than an issue of Time magazine.
Of course, there is always the Kindle app for the iPad…
2 comments:
My advisor has observed that e-books and the web are actually steps backward in technology--before the invention of the codex, when you wanted to find something in a scroll, you scrolled through until you could find it--then the codex was invented, and things got better--you could us bookmarks, you could leave your finger in places, you could store several volumes in a row, etc.
E-book technology takes us back to the scroll.
Good point! Who among us hasn't grown weary of scrolling down a web page. I suspect that e-books won't be able to adopt codex functionality for another couple of generations — I'm envisioning a display that folds open so you can view two pages at once, and where bookmarks are always viewable, and accessible by touch.
It's still has some arguable points, though — although the interface and convenience aren't as high, e-books more than make up for it in sheer storage capacity.
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