Amazon's Kindle Sparks Interest in E-Books
NEIRAD enilno edition
Kindle Information in a Nutshell:
Packing books for a long trip can be a problem. They’re heavy, they take up a lot of space in your carry-on bag, and it’s easy to accidentally leave them behind. Usually, they’re the first thing to go when you’re trying to lighten your load. But you pay the price later when you’re on a six hour flight to California with nothing to read but the emergency manual.
What if I told you that you could pack as many books as you wanted? And no, they don’t have to be paperbacks. You could pack “War and Peace”, a dictionary, all of those hard covers you’ve been meaning to read, and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for every day you’re gone. And all of this would weigh...eh…approximately 10.3 ounces and fit in your backpack.
Bulky hard cover books, meet Kindle; Amazon.com’s brainchild. Kindle was designed three years ago by a group of people who, sick and tired of buying books for $28.95 and never getting around to reading them, decided to create a “digital book”. The Kindle is about the size of a normal book, 7.5" x 5.3" x 0.7", except it has no pages. Just a large screen the size of a piece of paper, a keyboard, and buttons on the left and right to flip the pages.
This device allows people to download books from Amazon.com from wherever they are because of a wireless connectivity that doesn’t require a “hot spot” and each book has a download time of less than one minute. This also means that there aren’t any monthly fees or yearly contracts like there are with cell phones or Blackberry’s. And I haven’t gotten to the really good part yet. Books on the New York Times bestseller list each cost $9.95. That’s practically fifteen dollars less than on the shelf.
What also makes the Kindle desirable is the fact that you can highlight or star passages as you go along and write notes in the “margins”. Many readers don’t feel comfortable writing their thoughts on the pages in case they loan it to a friend, but with the Kindle, everything that’s highlighted or typed is erasable.
Although on the surface the Kindle seems like the biggest thing to hit the literary technological world in a long time, there are a few important kinks that need to be worked out. For example, it’s almost impossible to share an e-book with anyone else that has a Kindle unless they’re part of your family and you all share one account. It seems very unlikely that everyone in the family is going to have their own Kindle at $359 each. A few buyers on Amazon.com have complained that the e-books also cut off annotations and footnotes so the readers don’t get the full literary experience.
Many also criticized that the pages in the books turn really slow, making many people frustrated. What the big controversy behind the Kindle, however, is how it will affect actual, physical books and the bookstores where they are sold. Many are worried that it will do the same to bookstores as On Demand did to video rental stores. Why would people drive to a bookstore, pay twenty five dollars for a hardcover, and then have to lug it around everywhere when they could buy it instantly at home for ten dollars?
Thankfully, for this bookstore employee, many people aren’t fazed by this new wave of technology. A member off the staff at Barrett Bookstore said, “I think there will always be a demand for actual books. Reading on a screen just doesn’t compare to reading print on actual paper….and books have been around for thousands of years, I don’t think they’re going anywhere.”
What do DHS students think about the switch to electronic books?
