Opinatio

The Amazon Kindle is here. It's supposed to revolutionize the e-book and hurry the demise, I would imagine, of the paper and ink book so that all the trees can live. Except for the ones we chop down and ship to Japan and China as lumber.

I don't like the e-book, frankly, because I love the analogue book so much. I love the way a real book feels in my hands. I love the smell of books, old and new. I can't imagine, except while on a trip, really, holding this cold piece of plastic and flipping pages with a thumb-button. I want to read in the bathtub, you see, and that would be foolhardy with a Kindle. I don't want seven hundred books in this one apparatus, I want my books on shelves where I can see them all and browse them and change their order or stack them differently. I like their different sizes and colors and textures, and I like seeing their titles on the spines, which write, in a sense, a narrative about my own life. The e-book is an appliance, and it costs ($399) about as much as a new stove.

Think about how many real books you can buy with four hundred dollars. (And as I understand it, the four large you put out for a Kindle is only the beginning of your costs. There are the books themselves at ten bucks a pop, and then the electronic subscriptions and transfer fees, etc etc that will all add up over time.) Conservatively, buying paperbacks, used books, and hardbounds on sale, you can expand your library by forty to sixty titles, and who reads that many books in a year anyway? (I do, probably, but I'm a writer and I read for a living.) You can also resell some of them when you're finished if you want. On Amazon.

Hey, what if somebody steals your Kindle? What if you drop it down a hole? Suppose you wreck your car and it gets wrecked too? You're out a hell of a lot of money.

I won't go into the limited formats the Kindle can read, but the main one is a propietary format, which means that e-books you buy on Amazon (that's the whole point, isn't it?) can be read only on a Kindle. The business mind strikes again.

Oh, and there's the tradition of sharing books. You can't do that with a Kindle, unless you lend someone the entire machine, and that's like loaning someone your wallet.

I don't know. It seems to me we're going to sacrifice one of humanity's most practical inventions in favor of an overly complex and expensive toy. A book is a means of delivering ideas, whereas the Kindle appears to be a means of delivering customers.