Books for Me, Thanks
[For more on these Kindle investigations, see ten arguments against the Kindle, the initial query concerning blog content being redistributed without permission or compensation, the first wave of Kindle blogger responses, and the the second wave of Kindle blogger responses.]
Ten arguments against the Kindle (one against the promotional video):
1. A book does not require a battery. Let’s say you’re on the second to the last page and the battery goes out. Then you have to hunt around for the damn charger. But where did you put the charger? In the same time, you could have finished a compelling book.
2. If you lose the book, you can borrow it from a library or buy another copy or read it at a bookstore before they kick you out because you wore the wrong T-shirt or you slept with the wrong bookstore employee (but that’s a side issue). If you lose your Kindle, you have to pay $400. Oh sure, it’s always “backed up online.” But you’ll have to pay $400 to use it again. (I’m assuming likewise that the specific text use here is proprietary, meaning that you can’t view a Kindle text in another format on your computer. Hackers will almost certainly crack this and who knows? Maybe we’ll see a piracy problem for publishers.)
3. Thirty hours seems like a lot of battery life. (“You can read for days without having to plug in,” my ass. Thirty hours is thirty hours.) But let’s say you want to read Against the Day or The Recognitions in one long sitting. And what if you fall asleep reading? Will the Kindle stay on?
4. Can you really read with the Kindle in the bathtub? If you drop the Kindle into the tub, will it survive? Or will the LCD screen be toast? How durable is this little bastard anyway?
5. This whole business of flipping the page is rather arrogant of Amazon, isn’t it? In one fell swoop, Amazon wants to usurp the reading experience by having the page buttons on each side of the display. But what if you want to flip back? Well, that glorious sense of the index finger and thumb clutching the right corner of the page is now gone. You don’t feel that palpable sense of being one with a book. It’s more like a game of Bioshock.
6. What about those of us who enjoy looking up arcane words in the dictionary? Is the Kindle Dictionary an unabridged? Or is it one of those yuk-yuk high school dictionaries? OED plug-in? Can you highlight a specific phrase or just a line? (The video skips through the “highlighting” part quite rapidly, suggesting that we shouldn’t pay attention. But, dammit, it’s important.) How will this compare with highlighting or flagging a specific passage with a Post-It? All we get here is an option to dog-ear a corner. This is eminently unsuitable for reference. (I will say, however, that finding all citations of a word in a book is very helpful, although will this discourage people from memorizing poetry or specific passages?)
7. The font size option seems nice, but what of specific typesetting choices? How, for example, can a book like Only Revolutions or The Raw Shark Texts or even Alfred Bester’s enneagrams be enjoyed this way? And what of the juxtaposition of illustrations with text? There is sometimes a specific reason for why a photo or an illustration appears in relation to a particular page.
8. “The same wireless technology as advanced cell phones?” Great. Guess I’ll have to turn the Kindle off then during a transatlantic flight and waste twelve hours watching that shitty in-flight movie. Thanks, Amazon!
9. The ability to hold a mere 200 books for $400 (plus extra for books)? I can buy a 4 Gig Compact Flash card for $80.
10. This guy in the blue shirt looks like he sells insurance or some kind of corporate mercenary. I wouldn’t trust him to buy me a beer if I gave him the money. He’d pocket the Lincoln and then ask me for the five bucks I “didn’t give him.”
Another Roundup From the Past!
- Why stop at one pre-rigged roundup? Here’s another one for Monday. I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire two posts or only three? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is WordPress 2.3, the most powerful web app in the world, and would blow a newspaper clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself a question. Do I feel lucky? Well, yes and no. In large part because I’m the punk and you’re not.
- Except in this case, I’ve timed this second roundup to go up at sunrise in New York. Which makes you wonder when these roundups were written, or whether the first roundup is appreciably better than the second. One of many strange mysteries here at Reluctant.
- Atwood revisits Brave New World (via Maud)
- No, not the actress or the books editor. Is Elizabeth Taylor one of the most distinguished practitioners of the art of the short story from 1972? In other words, could this be a John P. Marquand figure that has been needlessly forgotten here?
- “And always wet your hands before you handle a trout!”
- Lindsey Gardner has been seeing her children’s books censored by publishers in some pretty odd ways. Sharp objects were removed in one book and another book banned youngsters from walking alone. If this keeps up, pretty soon any illustrated depiction of a human will be airbrushed out. Because really, you never know if their thoughts could be misinterpreted by a young reader! A little subconscious ambiguity here and a misperceived line there and eventually you’ll have yourself a corrupted young mind! Then again, to paraphrase Jack Burton, son of a bitch must pay!
- From the lively link collector Michael Orthofer, who I presume isn’t prerigging his roundups, comes this profile of New York Review of Books curator Edwin Frank — another of the Literary Eds You Can Trust in New York. If Mr. Park is “The Other Ed,” then I suppose Mr. Frank will be referred to as either “The Third Ed” or “The Curating Ed” or possibly “The Win, Place or Show Ed.”
- I’m with Gwenda on this. Why should fairy tales be confined to a specific century? Sounds to be like a temporal form of Jim Crow or apartheid, if you ask me.
Roundup
- Well, hello there, readers! I’m posting this on Monday, except I’m not really writing this on Monday. I am actually cobbling a few things together on Sunday just to throw you off! You see, while I normally maintain the practice of posting things in real time, Monday is occupied. I’ll spare you the details, but it involves more marsupial-style assaults on the keyboard and all manner of crazed pedantic info. So I’m going to try this temporally displaced post in lieu of real-time content and see if there’s any controversy. It is, after all, somehow dishonest. And you’ll even be reading this when the sun’s up, when, in fact, it’s “currently” dark outside. All this is a way of demonstrating just how incorrigible litbloggers are.
- Now what in the sam hill is going on here? It seems to involve haircuts, a trip to Jamaica, the recent acquisition of a digital camera, and the sticking out of tongues. I approve of at least two elements of this divine equation. Indeed, all this is a helpful reminder that I really need to get in more trouble. What I do know is that my current digital camera is on the fritz. So I can’t shock you with frightening photos of what I tend to look like after I’ve had a recent haircut (self-inflicted, I must confess; this is what happens when you bald). But I plan to frighten in other ways. And none of it involves Jonathan Franzen.
- I haven’t yet confessed how vital the hero is to Brooklyn food culture. Let me assure you that it is vital, although this means nothing to you because you are reading this many hours from the composition of this post. Which is to say that, yes, you should be worried about temporal blogging experiments.
- I regret to inform Ms. Klein (and Mr. Steinberg) that the shock is not wearing off. The problem is that “shock doctrine” is designed more as a buzz word rather than a bona-fide doctrine. I have no more use for buzz words than I do buzz cuts that do not come from my hand. It is just possible that Naomi Klein is a suitable barber, but I doubt it.
- Pete Anderson is trying out Oxford American and blogging about it. We really need more of these magazine consumer reports. So I put forth the question to readers: what are your magazine subscriptions and are you really getting your money’s worth?
- Chip McGrath is busy devoting at least two grafs to Martin’s appearance. I wonder sometimes if McGrath is wasting his times these days or if I’ve seriously overestimated him. This is a damn superficial interview. (And why the hell do you call this guy “Chip?” You may as well call him Sparky while you’re at it.)
- Kurt Vonnegut is the most popular novelist of 2007 and Slaughterhouse-Five has sold 280,000 copies since 2006.
- The Kansas City Star has named its top 100 books of the year. But since How Starbucks Saved My Life and the vastly overrated Amy Bloom novel Away is on it, well, you know what you’re in for.
- I would like to tell you that a novel by an author is better than you might be thinking, but these opinions shall have to be restrained.
- I also wish to confess of the noisy pipes here in Brooklyn. Good goddam, the sounds wake me up! How were such vociferous pipes constructed? Why weren’t they replaced? And why do we put up with this noise? Guess I’m now a New Yorker of sorts.
- I have, incidentally, grown another beard. Rex Reed calls it “the best beard Ed Champion tried to grow since the last one.” Roger Ebert says, “Thousands of follicles come together and we are left wondering why.” Kenneth Turan writes, “Why does he grow these beards in the first place? It is this rhetorical question that best represents the Ed Champion problem in a nutshell.” Okay, the reviews are mixed. But, for now, I’m keeping it.
Early Report on “Diary of the Dead”
Film Ick: “Last thought: I saw Diary of the Dead last night. It’s quite brilliant indeed – despite a few obvious problems with the overall concept. An angry, passionate, beautiful film that asks a lot of the right questions but doesn’t pretend to have all the right answers. The US release is in February; there’s no UK date yet; despite the AFM pre-sales hullaballoo, Romero claims to have no ideas for the next one yet and wouldn’t want us to hold our breath for it. I’d like to thank George Romero for being so committed to actually making films worth caring about, thinking about and, actually, loving. Diary repays your love. And it will join you when you stand up against the corruption, hypocrisy and greed.”