Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

My wife got a Kindle recently and it's been interesting to observe how it has affected her reading habits.

The library remains her first resort for most stuff (she's a librarian). Anything she wants to be able to loan to others still gets purchased as a hard copy. She's also decided that the Kindle is lousy for diet/health books, because it's not simple to flip through to relocate a particular recipe or chart or whatever.

The Kindle has become her primary means of consuming genre fiction, especially the urban fantasy she previously bought by the pound in rack-sized paperbacks. For the most part, these are not books she's likely to lend or re-read or want to show off on shelves.

The biggest selling point for her: if she needs something to read, she goes online and downloads it immediately, no trip to the store.

I have yet to read more than a few pages on the thing myself, but it's a very usable device, and being able to change the size of type is a plus. I can't see buying Kindle content myself, but I understand why she likes it.

Instant gratification for customers + the absence of shipping and inventory costs make these gadgets cash flow machines for Amazon.

i just don't trust ebooks not to become unreadable for some reason and require replacement. i'm glad you guys enjoy yours, but the idea that they'll replace paper books worries me, just because paper books are so durable.

i can see why people who read a lot of genre-fiction type stuff might like it, tbf

it's fun to predict the future, though. back when i worked at record stores like 10+ years ago, people would walk in and say: "WOW THEY STILL MAKE RECORDS," and we'd say yeah they do. but we kind of suspected that records were on the way out and would be gone forever pretty soon. now it seems like vinyl is as strong as ever--maybe even stronger? i mean, you can buy records at Borders now! and i think there are a *lot* more people who love books than records. i just don't see the kindle as destroying books, sorry.

Yeah, I think mainly I bought the Kindle for my trashy reading (Charlaine Harris and the like).

xxxpost Why? Why are electronic devices so bad? (Serious question)

Que, that's why so many recordshops have closed here: no sales. Just kidding.... sort of.

So what if they are durable, Maria? The kindle (or rather books on it) are also "durable" in a way: you can download'em ad nauseam

electronic devices aren't bad in and of themselves, just the idea that everything in the world should be replaced with an electronic device is kind of silly and childish.

there's just something rather beautiful about books and the notion that another glowing screen will replace one of the basic, cheap things that makes life wonderful is completely 100% awful.

not to get all "emo"

nathalie - for now, yes, but who knows what the reading technology/format/drm protection is going to be like in ten or twenty years? we don't really have any electronic format that's proven as durable as paper books. this is not really an issue for most of us, if it's stuff you're not worried about "owning" (i get most of my books out of the library anyway and don't own them)...but in a very hypothetical sense if ebooks replaced paper books to the point that paper became unavailable i think we'd end up losing a lot.

I'm buying as many physical books as I did before I got a kindle in April, but I'm reading twice as much. I rather not read a physical book on the bus/while I'm eating lunch at my desk/waiting for appointments.

i don't want to live in a world where all of these libraries and beautiful books are replaced by a single thin, electronic reading device. yes i know, i know, maybe someday, "hey people won't even MISS books!" but i just think if they do that's because people won't know what they're missing. people want everything *now* and they want everything convenient. sometimes i'm afraid technology is turning everyone into an ADD gadget junkie.

Wasn't there an Onion article about that? "Most of time spent being entertained by illuminated rectangles" or something?

I share the love for dead tree books, from my cold dead hands, etc., but some of this discussion seems strangely familiar.

Managing a Digital Music Collection

I adore print books lots and am seriously in romantic love with certain branches of the Chicago Public Library and I want an ebook reader (not a Kindle though) so bad I could spit, for the following reasons:

1. With the right reader (so not the Kindle), I can borrow ebooks from my local library, saving me a trip and the inevitable fines I rack up because the library is not totally convenient to anything I do, and also sparing me the skeezy experience of finding food and bugs and whatnot crushed between the pages of the actual books I check out.

2. I will no longer be confined to reading great big books only at home, since I won't have to factor in their weight and portability into the foot-and-public-transit commute equation. I would have killed somebody for this technology when I was in law school. Then I would not have had to make the choice between back pain or the ignominy of a rollie bag.

3. I can bring as many damn books as I want with me when I travel and save room in my suitcase for other important things like excessive shoes.

4. I can reduce my household clutter because with an ebook reader, even if I buy a book instead of checking it out of the library, it will be in electronic format instead of sitting on a shelf taking up valuable small apartment space and gathering dust and possibly embarrassing me when my smarter friends come over and peruse my bookshelves.

I feel like physical books are on the way out, but it'll be a longer, generational road. Maybe, like vinyl records, there will still be a market for the physical product of books for a long time, but maybe it'll also be more of a collectors thing and not where the bulk of sales are. Definitely, as I've gotten older, I feel less of an attachment to physical things... simply being able to have a library worth of books in my pocket is an increasingly attractive idea (more so than having a room full of books in my apartment), cleaner, more efficient and easier to move. Still, a book reading device as appealing as the best mp3 players has yet to arrive, though I'm sure its time isn't far away.

Totally. I mean, I have a 15-year-old paperback copy of Wuthering Heights because I love that book and I reread it occasionally, but I'm attached to the story, not the physical book. I just keep it around because I never know when I'll want to grab it and read a bit of it. I'd be just as content to have that in electronic format.

the more stuff gets turned digital the crappier tidying ur room will become, u know when you just end up spending all night going through all ur shit and getting v. nostalgic

or, when I went looking for a quote i thought was in Air Guitar (it was in Invisible Dragon) and ended up basically rereading Air Guitar and probably enjoying it the most I ever have.

also, just picking up my copy of tender is the night reminds me of reading it on a bus in Spain

also when you move and you have to dump a ton of books there is a definite sense of i dunno, being curatorial abt ur collection and with endless disc space, shit like that just disappears

Ha, not having to move a ton of books is a huge check in the pro-column for ebooks as far as I'm concerned. That shit's heavy.

just tryna turn a negative into a postive!

How many of you who are into the Kindle or another e-reader are also digital media people when it comes to your music collection? (Meaning you don't buy CDs or vinyl very often or at all.)

K, can't really address that as I don't listen to much music anymore. :-( But when it comes to films: I used to buy tons of DVDs, I don't anymore. Same applied to music (before I stopped listening).

Anyway off to check amazon for some trashy novels. SEE YA. :-)

I am a digital media person when it comes to my music collection. A lot of this is my husband's influence, though. If we hadn't started dating, I would probably still have dial up and 8-tracks.

There are some books I like as artifacts because of the internal/external design, and some that I don't think are going to be replaceable by digital works because of that. That said, I think there are a lot of things that you could do with digital publications, outside of searching/footnotes/citations.

I bought Charlie Stross's Accelerando the other day, and I wanted to read it over lunch today but left the paperback at home. I looked at his site, and it turns out that he released it for free electronically. A few seconds of scrolling on my phone to find my spot, and I'm continuing it over lunch. If I didn't have my phone, I could have eaten at my desk and read it on my desktop computer.

I'll keep reading the paperback when I get home, but the benefits of having a (nearly-) instantly reproducible version everywhere is nice.

A much-belated report - we love this thing! It would be neat to see more connectivity with other resources - the ability to check out books from the library, for one - but I haven't much time to browse the library currently, so, for reading in bed or on a plane, this thing is pretty great.

See also - storage capacity, reduced cost of brand new books, etc.

when they make one of these with a screen that's as comfortable to look at for hours as a bit of paper i'm in!

wasn't that like three or four years ago?

http://www.eink.com/

http://oink.cd/

I'll probably always buy books, just because I need to have the physical objects for things I really care about. But I think I'll eventually buy something like the Kindle for books I want to read but don't care about owning, archived blog posts, magazines, and newspapers. Like Nathalie, though, I'm scaling back physical media purchases. I think I'm done with CDs. I rarely buy DVDs; Netflix, YouTube, and video podcasts have taken place of that for me. (I never really bought many DVDs in the first place though.) For radio, I'm onto podcasts. So, I'm looking at pretty much all digital media with the exception of books I really care about in the near future. Which doesn't really bother me. Books take up enough space; it'll be nice to have everything else up in the cloud and on my harddrive.

lol @ Mr. Que

how fuckin hard is it to fabricate some contact lenses with the capability to watch a movie or surf the internet

They've been selling amazing goggles with the ability to do so in in-flight magazines and at the sharper image (rip) for years. I'm sure they're greeeeeat.

Inflight magazines : grownups :: back of comic books : children

In that case, I would rather be a child forever

Totally OT:

yeah dvds, etc. have very few characteristics that lend themselves to becoming fetish objects. books and records have a lot of them. xp yeah cover design is one example

I've been thinking that an aspect here where CDs and DVDs (and cassettes and VHSes) failed objectwise is that most of the packaging of e.g. two CD albums is interchangable: It's just inlays, swap their inlays + media -- and wherein is the identity of the original package you bought? Yes of course it is silly, but this is probably the reason my digipak CDs feel more "objectish" and um fondlable than my jewelcase ones to me. (Another way of saying the same: because of availability of spare parts they are somewhat more robust twds damage and destruction, hence less precioussss.)

More on topic: I'm generally very pro the idea of electronic stuff on rectangular screens replacing oldschool content carriage, but find myself feeling that actual books have this thing where you can just flip it open at random, seeing what's there, think "oh I wonder what's just a few pages before this" etc, just using your fingers! Similar "analog" functionality may just conceivably be convincingly implemented in elec devices, but I think we're very far away from that still.

mh, it is all about really wanting to believe.

this thing where you can just flip it open at random, seeing what's there, think "oh I wonder what's just a few pages before this" etc, just using your fingers!

Uh, you can do this on a kindle, also with just your fingers. Maybe next year you'll be able to do the same with just your voice.

it's a lot slower and clunkier though

no papercuts though

I like to think that the idea of the physical book outlasting the CD or vinyl is correct. But why do I like to think that? Not sure. I used to rep for physical music media - cover pictures, inlay books, lyric sheets - but now I'm happy with the digital shit, no booklets, no lyrics (they'll be on the internet), a 150*150px cover gif. Now I've just been gifted a sony reader and I like it - especially as it can read any rtf ro txt file, hello project gutenberg and 30,000 free books - but it has its deficiencies. Searching and backtracking is definitely harder. OTOH they seem like relatively easy difficulties to overcome. Could realtime fulltext search be a killer app?

Kindle has "realtime fulltext search" (fully indexed searching, device-wide).

Searching and backtracking is definitely harder.

Than in physical books???

said it before and i'll say it again: the future of ebooks is in a tablet that is either unfoldable or digital paper and is NOT ebook specific, but plays comics/games/movies/mp3s and I'm looking forward to Nintendo making it in the next ten years or so.
I'll early adopt on the kindle the minute they do comix, tho

out of curiosity: how many of you are actually on the Kindle or some other e-reader? it seems like most of ilx isn't. (I don't own one.) also, how many of you are also mostly digital for music? (and if so, do you buy mp3s, stream, etc.?)

for people who like reading web content offline & own an iPhone:

http://www.instapaper.com/

seriously.

the book in it's current format has been around for what, a thousand years? because it's such a ridic convenient format (in most cases). i seriously doubt it's gonna start disappearing in any significant way anytime soon. it's gonna be GREAT for college/high school students (no way can anyone convince me that a physical book is better for hauling round all your textbook stuff), and it may even increase what ppl read: if i had a kindle or equivalent device i think i'd def read more, esp in the instance of travelling and that kind of thing, but i wouldn't buy any less physical books (even tho i rotate out all my paperback fiction).

omar, i don't think you have much to worry about, honestly.

I don't think because it has been around for yonks means it'll stay for another thousand years.

when they make one of these with a screen that's as comfortable to look at for hours as a bit of paper i'm in!

Started reading on my Kindle last night and I have to say it's so comfortable! Didn't actually expect it THAT comfortable tbh. Only say it doesn't put the pages on it. hah. I have this habit of checking how many pages a book has, that way I know how far I am. BUt then I noticed that there's a percentage in the left corner. Cool. :-) My husband laughed.