Get Your Hands Off My Book...and That Is Not a Book!!

Oh, is it time for another one of my anti-Kindle rants?
Oh sure...there is always room for an anti-Kindle rant. And Jello, if you are old enough to remember that commercial.
Now yes, I must say that I have not used a Kindle but for more than a few minutes. But I did have the chance while on vacation to read a significant part of a book on a Sony Reader, and I was not terribly impressed. I kept reaching up to turn the page. I couldn't break the habit of decades! But beyond that, I didn't really like the way the type looked, I didn't like the way you have to hold it...like I said, I was not really impressed.

But with the Kindle, there are much bigger issues as well. Like the fact, as people have recently discovered, that Kindle has the ability to 'reach' into your device and remove a 'book'. Now they said they mishandled that episode and apologized, and no doubt promised not to do it again, but doesn't it just concern you that they can do that. Is anyone worried that someone, the Evil Amazon, has ultimate control over your books, especially since Kindle books can not be played on any other piece of non-Amazon hardware? That you have to agree to a 'terms of service" just to buy books?

But most of my latest ammunition come from this interesting article by Nicholson Baker from this months New Yorker.
First, there is the whole look of "e-paper".

"The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon?"

Ok, that seems to be a major issue to me. He then compared some Kindle versions to real books. Missing beautiful illustrations, missing or unreadable maps, the color coding in text books gone. Not always an issue with every book you might read, true, but with a number of books I can think of it would be extremely important. Why would I want to but a 'book' that is incomplete? He tries a newspaper subscription on the Kindle. The Kindle version

"lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography—and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio."

Ok, that sounds like a pretty rotten way to read a newspaper to me.

He goes to Freeport, Maine to meet a Kindle owner, the manager of a British import store across the street from L.L.Bean, who is part of the “See a Kindle in Your City” promotion. It is cute, she has made a nice, little cover for it. But when taking it to the neighboring bookstore, he is surprised by how many books are not available. At home, comparing it to his own books, he is surprised at how many books he has that are not available. Of course, I know that will change when the Evil Amazon pressures every publisher and author to sign on and make available more Kindle editions. Because certainly Amazon is huge enough to exert that sort of pressure.

However, I was even more upset to find out that I noticed neither the British import store or the book store next to it on my recent visit to Freeport. I was blinded by the beauty that is L.L.Bean I assume!

Bottom line, yes, I understand the convenience of being able to carry a bunch of 'books' in one little device, the convenience of being able to order and download a book in seconds, but there is a price to pay for that convenience. An aesthetic price, in some cases, a usability price. You can't loan out your books, or sell them...speaking of which, here is an amusing video about that very issue...


But my greatest concern is when you buy an e-book, most especially when you buy it from Amazon, with their proprietary software, what are you actually buying. Did you read the small print in the "terms of service"? Will you still have access to those books years from now or will you maybe have to 'upgrade' your hardware or software at an additional cost to continue to have access to the material? That is over the $350 you already paid for the privilege of buying Kindle 'books' at a small discount from the Evil Amazon. Wow, I could buy a lot of real books for $350 and then do what I want with them. Maybe even offer thrm to my readers inn a giveaway. As Mr. Baker puts it,

"Here’s what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon."

Hmmmm...I'll pass on that for now thanks.

Well, in honor of Freeport, Maine, where I did not test drive a Kindle or see that bookstore (although I found another on the edge of town and bought a book. Or two), a couple of pictures of the town from my trip.



Welcome To Freeport and Hello From the Giant Freeport Indian


One Store on the L.L.Bean campus and a Big L.L.Bean Shoe in the 4th of July Parade.