Unba//anced

the cover of newsweek this week features amazon's kindle, the latest e-reader to hit the market.



but the creator, jeff bezos, thinks this will revolutionize reading and books - "Books 2.0" - but i'd like to point out that using a phrase like that isn't going to get anyone under the age of 30 to touch it b/c that's corny to them. plus, these e-readers have been introduced before without much success. it's awfully ballsy to think that this reader is going to wipe out the need for dead wood.

as a techie and a writer, i can see the geekiness of a gadget that holds up to 200 titles, how cool that is to carry around all that knowledge, but you can only download from amazon (and rely on sprint's connection - HA), plus reading a whole novel on screen seems a bit headache-inducing to me. it's one thing to read an article, newspaper or magazine online, but to read 200+ pages on a "6" diagonal E-Ink® electronic paper display, 600 x 800 pixel resolution at 167 ppi, 4-level gray scale" doesn't seem like the most comfortable way to read. plus, how can i make notes to myself in the margins?

Siva Vaidhyanathan on his blog does an excellent job of breaking down a major issue with this new reader:

Levy does a great job moving from the gee-whizness of the device to the social, intellectual, and commercial processes and transactions that are in so much flux. Best of all, he talks to Bob Stein and Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book.

Still, I wonder if Levy missed some important issues here. I appears that Amazon has forged its service with essential yet potentially frustrating links to Sprint for wireless connectivity and the major publishers for supplying digital text in the right formats. That means digital rights management. That means consumer frustration and massive failures.

Is there really an industry out there that still believes DRM can be effective and consumer-friendly?

And, as Levy points out in the article, publishers are hardly playing this game smartly. They have refused to lower prices for electronic distribution. And much of their back valuable back catalogs include classics still under copyright yet lacking explicit permissions for electronic rights.

As far as the dream of textual connectivity and annotations -- making books more "Webby" -- we don't need new devices to do that. Nor do we need different social processes. But we do need better copyright laws to facilitate such remixes and critical engagement.

So consider this $400 device from Amazon. Once you drop that cash, you still can't get books for the $9 cost of writing, editing, and formating. You still pay close to the $30 physical cost that includes all the transportation, warehousing, taxes, returns, and shoplifting built into the price. You can only use Amazon to get texts, thus locking you into a service that might not be best or cheapest. You can only use Sprint to download texts or get Web information. You can't transfer all you linking and annotating to another machine or network your work. If the DRM fails, you are out of luck. If the device fails, you might not be able to put your library on a new device.

All the highfallutin' talk about a new way of reading leading to a new way of writing ignores some basic hard problems: the companies involved in this effort do not share goals. And they do not respect readers or writers.