The Vexing Kindle

The New York Times has an interesting article on the Kindle, the newest electronic e-reader to hit the market. You may have heard about the Kindle by now: it's small, it's white, it has been screen resolution. Here it is, in all its tiny glory:



Hope is high for the Kindle's future. For starters, critics are suggesting that Amazon.com might do for the digital book reading digerati what Apple's iTunes did for mp3 music: provide a comprehensive library of downloadable properties available at an affordable price. But wait, there's more!:

Sony uses E Ink in its e-book Reader, which it introduced in 2006, but the Kindle has a feature that neither Sony nor many e-reader predecessors ever possessed: books and other content can be loaded wirelessly, from just about anywhere in the United States, using the high-speed EVDO network from Sprint.

That's right. Say you're hankering to compare the literary version of, say, Atonement, with its screen adaptation. The Kindle will allow the user to rapidly download books across a high-speed network. No more tedious reserve lists at the local library! No more tracking down an actual bookstore and buying a paper copy!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure that consumers purchase novels on impulse, or struggle with the ability to quickly secure a book to read. Unlike, say, blogs or magazine articles, the mainstays of the web, books require some time to read, and it's not like your business competitor has read Atonement before, thereby gaining some strategic advantage over you.

I guess what I'm really trying to say is that while I don't agree with Steve Jobs' derision towards reading -- "“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” -- I do agree that people who in fact do still read books are not the technological pioneers who will buy the Kindle, or subscribe to the now now now mentality that drives much of digital commerce.