In the past two or three days I've had not one but two people ask me what I know about the Kindle. Which is weird because I've been thinking about posting about it after seeing an episode of The Martha Stewart Show last week in which Amazon founder Jeff Bezos appeared to talk about the device. (She also had a guest talking about tartans versus plaids who said the main difference between a tartan and a plaid is symmetry. You can turn the main pattern of a tartan over and it will still look the same. But I digress...)
I couldn't figure out why they would ask me since I'm not much of a technophile. I can barely run this blog. Maybe I should stop writing my things to do list on my forehead in big black lettering.
I told the last person who asked me what I thought of the Kindle to tune into Stop Okay Go today because I'd do a post on it and I've become one of those snotty blogger types that can no longer communicate interpersonally like a normal human being.
Anyway, the impression I left with after Bezos made his sales pitch on Martha's show was that I'm now more receptive to at least giving the Kindle a chance. I wish there was someplace I could go and give it a feel and test drive.
Bezos acknowledged that the Kindle will never replace the tactile aspect of holding a book, the satisfaction of hearing the page as you turn it and for me the feeling of forward motion as you're reading. There's something tremendously gratifying, in my mind, at being able to gage the thickness of the pages you've put behind you and looking to see how far you have to go. (Comparable to the moving circle that moves through the red bar at the bottom of a You Tube video, seeing where you are in a book gives you a feeling of placement and control.) Maybe there is something on it that addresses this issue, all I can make out from the demos and pics is a rolling wheel. They have worked hard on making the print and fonts more book-like and friendly to the eye.
The Kindle does have some terrific pros. One thing I love is that unlike the iPod, its wireless and you can download books wherever you are without having to go through a computer. I also like how thin it is. The other design elements make it look like something from a medical supply store to me. Maybe it can read my blood sugar. Who knows.
One of Bezos' main big selling points is that the Kindle is environmentally friendly and he argued that this will mean fewer trees being cut down & less fuel being used to transport and house books. Which is true, but how disposable are the Kindles when we move on to the next thing? Am fairly sure the Kindle is not made of hemp. At $399.00 it is expensive, but with some of the Kindle books cheaper than print, for example Mary Higgins Clark's Where Are They Now is $25.95 in hard form and only $9.99 in Kindle, I'm sure you'll make some of the loss back quickly if you're a heavy reader.
The demo also shows that you can read newspapers such as the New York Times that are updated every morning, websites and even Wikipedia on Kindle. Then again I can do all that with what I have now. Sooooo, it just makes me wonder if Kindle and in fact, Amazon, won't one day be usurped by whatever company is dominating wireless communications and media...because what they are offering seems to dovetail with a lot of technology (am thinking Apple) that is already available.