Amazon Kindle

As usual, Virginia Postrel has an interesting post on the Amazon Kindle and the future for books.

I like this Jonathan Frazen quote:

"Am I fetishizing ink and paper? Sure, and I'm fetishizing truth and integrity too."

This seems to be another, albeit bigger, version of the film-HD argument. Although with HD and Film, one can see how HD will eventually make film obsolete...I don't see the same thing happening to he book because of the physical nature of the object. A book is durable and easily swapped and has this physical presence in a room, something the Amazon Kindle doesn't.

I like the idea of the Kindle as a complement to books, not a replacement.

On a side note...I think the bigger victim is the newspaper, which is already suffering from online reading. I like the physical nature of the paper, but the content has become such crap, that I moved online because there is so much better material. I could see papers themselves becoming even less popular as the Kindle and other devises become widespread.



The book as a physical object