Collected Miscellany

If you are reading this blog it should not come as a shock to you that I like to read. And yes Mr. FTC man, I do get a decent amount of review copies. But I also buy far too many a great many books. I also own and very much enjoy my Kindle.

What does all this mean? It means by the ancient rights of the Internets I get to step up on my soapbox and unleash a diatribe of my choosing. [OK, I made that part up ... but it sounds good doesn't it?]

But I do, however, feel like I might have some perspective on the whole e-books pricing issue both as a consumer and as someone with philosophical opinions on the matter.

So let us use this handy-dandy notebook! New York Times article on the subject as a jumping off point shall we? If you are game, see below.

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Hearing that the Amazon Kindle had been compared to an eight-track player Alan Kaufman decided he needed a real attention grabber analogy if he was to gather the eyeballs necessary to get Huntington Post readers to click away from pictures of the latest porn actress claiming to be Tiger Wood’s mistress.

Not content for hyperbole he went straight for ridiculous and offensive. That’s right, Kaufman decided to use the Holocaust to make his point:

When I hear the term Kindle I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.

I believe my reaction is best expressed in the language of teenager texters everywhere: WTF?

Is Kaufman really insinuating that e-readers are akin to racial genocide? Even for the Huntington Post this is absurd (but its lack of logic is par for the course I am afraid).

Kaufman tendentiously connects Nazi policies with new technology and the process of putting books into digital form and decides that a literary holocaust is upon us.

The hi-tech campaign to relocate books to Google and replace books with Kindles is, in its essence, a deportation of the literary culture to a kind of easily monitored concentration camp of ideas, where every examination of a text leaves behind a trail, a record, so that curiosity is also tinged with a sense of disquieting fear that some day someone in authority will know that one had read a particular book or essay. This death of intellectual privacy was also a dream of the Nazis. And when I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.

But his argument is made up of nothing more than his own lack of shame in using the Holocaust to comment on the Kindle and some stream of consciousness paragraphs about the history of the Holocaust, Nazi attitudes about technology and books and a tacked on conclusion that links this all to the Kindle.

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The Wall Street Journal ponders this question:

Books are having their iPod moment this holiday season. But buyer beware: It could also turn out to be an eight-track moment.

While e-reading devices were once considered a hobby for early adopters, Justin Timberlake is now pitching one on prime-time TV commercials for Sony Corp. Meanwhile, Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle e-reading device has become its top-selling product of any kind. Forrester Research estimates 900,000 e-readers will sell in the U.S. in November and December.

But e-reader buyers may be sinking cash into a technology that could become obsolete. While the shiny glass-and-metal reading gadgets offer some whiz-bang features like wirelessly downloading thousands of books, many also restrict the book-reading experience in ways that trusty paperbacks haven’t, such as limiting lending to a friend. E-reader technology is changing fast, and manufacturers are aiming to address the devices’ drawbacks.

Yes, the WSJ brings us the hard hitting journalism that tells us that if you don’t have disposable income and/or aren’t a gadget person you may not want to spend hundreds of dollars on a dedicated e-reader!

“If you have the disposable income and love technology—not books—you should get a dedicated e-reader,” says Bob LiVolsi, the founder of BooksOnBoard, the largest independent e-book store. But other people might be better-off repurposing an old laptop or spending $300 on a cheap laptop known as a netbook to use for reading. “It will give you a lot more functionality, and better leverages the family income,” he says.

Wow! I never would have figured that out myself. To be fair, the article does go on to offer some contrasting opinions on the pros and cons of various devices.

But I find this debate tiresome in some ways.

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Just because I love my Kindle doesn’t mean I don’t think this is super cool: