The Kindle

Books have finally caught on

One can not look at a kindle and not think; IPod. Not only for the fact that with it's monochrome screen and white plastic body it kind of looks like the first IPods, but also because what iPods and mp3s in general have done for music, so has the kindle done for literature.

Changes in recording and reproduction of writing have come slower then changes in the recording and reproduction of sound, but then again the recording and reproduction of sound is just over a hundred years old and the ability to write and keep records has been a defining element of civilization since literally the dawn of history.

Not only is the tradition of writing crucial to qualify civilization but it has also been the instigator of epochs, spreading ideas of the divine, bringing us out of dark ages, mass media and mass literacy defining the modern world. We live in the age of information no less. And maybe one day, when we look at this in a historical prospective, we will place the kindle and e-book readers in general along side paper, the printing press, the computer and the internet.

The Kindle is a natural successor to the book, having the dimension of a small magazine (8" x 5.3" x 0.36") and weighing less than a paperback (10.2 ounces), it can hold about 1,500 books.

The books can be purchased and downloaded wirelessly for a fraction of the price of the dead tree edition from the kindle shop, which currently holds over 360,000 titles, directly to your kindle. Your library is automatically backed-up online. You can also download major U.S. and international newspapers, magazines, popular bogs and feeds and audio books.

The kindle carries a dictionary; The New Oxford American Dictionary with over 250,000 entries and definitions and even has free wireless access to Wikipedia.org. With Kindle in hand, looking up people, places, events, and more has never been easier. It gives whole new meaning to the phrase walking encyclopedia.

The kindle can read PDF-files and Amazon's Whispernet service; you can send your documents directly to your Kindle and read them anytime, anywhere.

The full QWERTY keyboard allows you make notes and bookmarks, you can add annotations to text, just like you might write in the margins of a book. And because it is digital, you can edit, delete, and export your notes. You can highlight and clip key passages and bookmark pages for future use. You'll never need to bookmark your last place in the book, because Kindle remembers for you and always opens to the last page you read.

Adjustable text size, screen rotation and full image zoom gives you much more options to enhance your reading experience. The kindle will even read for you, sorry, to you with the read-to-me feature in either a male or female voice. The kindle comes with audio jack and built-in speakers.

The kindle has a one week battery life, two weeks if wireless is turned off, is charged through a USB portal and is fully charged within 4 hours.

I have sympathy for the book, and with my bibliophilic father I have grown fond of my living room with towering bookcases. But as the mp3-player hasn't been the death of the LP, the E-book reader won't be the death of the book. People still build great LP collections, and the bookcase will not soon be something of the past. LP's and books have something upon themselves, an emotional bond we have of them. The LP being a symbol of entertainment, artistic skill, and bringing across ideas, book only more so and that of academic virtue, but both are symbols of creation. These are not subject to technological progress, rather advancement in media compliment them.

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