Does anyone use a Kindle?

originally posted by Chris Sipes:
Perhaps you find that the book publishing business is serving your needs well. And perhaps things will turn around. I envy your enthusiasm. Me? I'm hoarding books and awaiting the apocalypse.
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Chris,

I had no intention of conveying enthusiasm, rather I was fishing for objective information upon which your declarations were based. The kind of thing a guy might want to know if he were considering buying stock in Random House. (Not that I am, but that kind of statistical or otherwise concrete data.)

I'm not intuitively certain that the book industry is "on its last legs" although I certainly see digital formats making in-roads in leaps. So I just wanted to know if you were ahead of my curve.

Personally, I like books. So do many people of my generation.
I read the New York Times newspaper and not their on-line edition.
I know that both formats are threatened, and I have that from people inside the industry. But I suspect that us luddites are more numerous than you might think. Of course, we are older and we will die sooner than most folks that have found digital formats their preference.
So, in the long run, I suspect you are right - but maybe not as soon as you anticipate.

And certainly, this is all moot if the apocalypse gets me (and them) first.

Best, Jim
 
I'm sure a Kindle is wonderfully convenient until it needs to be recharged. Or until it crashes. Or needs a system upgrade. My old paperbacks, in comparison, are built on an incredibly reliable architecture that never needs updates and is completely virus-resistant (although I suppose mold may eventually become an issue). Not only that, books operate (in daylight, at least) using no fossil fuels or toxic metals.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:

The comparison to CDs is seriously inaccurate. CDs took over from tapes and vinyl because they provided better quality sound. A Kindle version does not provide better quality thought.
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Jonathan, I don't think it is necessary to join the debate as to whether CDs provide better musical reproduction in order to respond to this. The point is that CDs provided a different musical product, many people wanted it, and as a result previously unavailable recordings became available in the new format. Similarly, electronic readers are a different reading format. If people want them, it is possible, indeed perhaps likely, that many books now difficult to obtain will become readily available. It would save you, for example, from having to lug around your Modern Library Giant edition of the Wandering Jew, for example.

I am surprised you dismiss the analogy to CDs as "seriously inaccurate." Is it really your contention that the introduction of a new medium is not likely to lead to the reintroduction of old content in the new medium, a phenomenon clearly evidenced with CDs
 
1) I meant to say, or ought to have said, that CDs provided better quality sound than vinyl for those who don't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on stereo reproduction and don't care that the vinyl degrades quickly under normal use--in other words me and non-nerds like me. I am a lover of classical music but not an audiophile. I, of course, have heard the arguments for the ultimate superiority of vinyl and I have no refutation to make to those arguments except that, given my equipment, I don't experience that ultimate superiority, so it's a hypothetical point for me.

2)On Karenin: English does not feminize name endings for women. In most translations, therefore, wives have the same name as husbands. Thus, despite the fact that her name is in the title, Anna's last name should be translated as Karenin (the "a" not being part of her proper name, but a morpheme that has no analogue in English). I also tend to refer to the Proust novel as either The Search for Lost Time or In Search of Lost Time (I think an argument can be made for either rendering, and neither changes much, whereas Rememberance of Things Past is a line from a Shakespeare Sonnet). I think Sharon and I disagreed about this stuff before and she is welcome to chime in here.

3) Chris, I took you to be saying that Kindle would "revive the reading business" not merely that old content would be changed to a new medium. It was that contention I was disputing on the basis that the basic act of reading hasn't been changed, only some balance of convenience and inconvenience (and Kindles have serious inconveniences as of now if you exist in a couple that passes books and newspapers back and forth or among friends that borrow lend and give away books). I took it that CDs did for other people what they did for me, enhance the experience of recorded music thus enhancing my desire for some forms of it (most especially vocal music and chamber music in my case). This enhancement may not be absolutely true, and it may have been true only for me, though I suspect that isn't the case.

Phew.
 
originally posted by The Wine Mule:
I'm sure a Kindle is wonderfully convenient until it needs to be recharged. Or until it crashes. Or needs a system upgrade. My old paperbacks, in comparison, are built on an incredibly reliable architecture that never needs updates and is completely virus-resistant (although I suppose mold may eventually become an issue). Not only that, books operate (in daylight, at least) using no fossil fuels or toxic metals.
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T, I can't speak to the Kindle as I returned the one I ordered.

The Sony PRS 505 has ~1,500 page turns between recharges. And it only takes about an hour to recharge.

Our eReaders have not crashed. Even so, the eBooks on the eReaders are easily retained/backed up on my PC.

The eReaders should not be susceptible to virus intrusions and don't need updates.

The tradeoff(s) between hard books depleting our trees, becoming trash, etc. and eReaders possibly being less than green are unknown. Determining this would be an interesting exercise.

. . . . . Pete
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
1) I meant to say, or ought to have said, that CDs provided better quality sound than vinyl for those who don't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on stereo reproduction and don't care that the vinyl degrades quickly under normal use--in other words me and non-nerds like me. I am a lover of classical music but not an audiophile. I, of course, have heard the arguments for the ultimate superiority of vinyl and I have no refutation to make to those arguments except that, given my equipment, I don't experience that ultimate superiority, so it's a hypothetical point for me.
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Right now you can buy a brand new English made Rega P1 turntable for $395 which will crush any CD player you can buy for an equivalent price. You can play your old beautiful Deutsche Gramophones and Archiv Produktions and it will work with any decent stereo. Audiophile does not have to mean hundreds of thousands!
 
originally posted by BJ:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
1) I meant to say, or ought to have said, that CDs provided better quality sound than vinyl for those who don't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on stereo reproduction and don't care that the vinyl degrades quickly under normal use--in other words me and non-nerds like me. I am a lover of classical music but not an audiophile. I, of course, have heard the arguments for the ultimate superiority of vinyl and I have no refutation to make to those arguments except that, given my equipment, I don't experience that ultimate superiority, so it's a hypothetical point for me.
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Right now you can buy a brand new English made Rega P1 turntable for $395 which will crush any CD player you can buy for an equivalent price. You can play your old beautiful Deutsche Gramophones and Archiv Produktions and it will work with any decent stereo. Audiophile does not have to mean hundreds of thousands!
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Thanks for the tip. I was looking for an old Technics turntable, but they are difficult to find. This looks like an affordable alternative.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
I think Sharon and I disagreed about this stuff before and she is welcome to chime in here.
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Yes, I thought I would chime in, but maybe it's better to hark back to what we said before. Let me have a gander.

In the meantime, I'll just rail about the fact that the Brits have seen fit to rename Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. There it is published as Fiesta, as an otherwise interesting article on bullfighting by Giles Coren in last Sunday's Times irksomely reminded me.
 
Here's my prediction about Kindles and their kind: they will take over and in five years print books will become a luxury item as print houses around the world crash and burn and those involved move on to other things. Kindles will become much better and more aesthetic, even using natural finish materials, and perhaps flexible to become like a nice piece of parchment, returning it to a more naturalish, bookish feel. But I think there will be a collective feeling that we lost something important, sort like how we felt after small town downtowns died after Costco arrived, or when we actually spent more than 5% of our time outside (now the national average).

It is hard to imagine anything nicer than sitting down with a good book in a nice place. I just don't get that feeling about anything electronic.
 
originally posted by BJ:
Here's my prediction about Kindles and their kind: they will take over and in five years print books will become a luxury item as print houses around the world crash and burn and those involved move on to other things. Kindles will become much better and more aesthetic, even using natural finish materials, and perhaps flexible to become like a nice piece of parchment, returning it to a more naturalish, bookish feel. But I think there will be a collective feeling that we lost something important, sort like how we felt after small town downtowns died after Costco arrived, or when we actually spent more than 5% of our time outside (now the national average).

It is hard to imagine anything nicer than sitting down with a good book in a nice place. I just don't get that feeling about anything electronic.
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I think that print-on-demand may fill in some of that gap as printing tech and bandwidth increase. I know that we've seen some companies experiment (and fizzle) in this sector before, but I don't think the tech and market were yet ready.

In the same way you see an evolution in the feel of electronic readers, I think there's a decent possibility the same pipeline that brings us the digital versions of the books might supply either an at-home or commercial printing service where various "editions" of printed materials could be picked up (and likely customized) on demand. Cover design, text layout, etc. could be part of the spec- and you could buy cheap galleys, not-too-expensive trade paperbacks, and even special edition (collector? limited?) hardback. And of course, it would service vanity publishing as well.

It's not unfeasible that, over the same 5 year period BJ references for e-readers above, we'll see the tech evolving (and price point dropping) to the point where the book is created in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.
 
originally posted by BJ:
Here's my prediction about Kindles and their kind: they will take over and in five years print books will become a luxury item as print houses around the world crash and burn and those involved move on to other things. Kindles will become much better and more aesthetic, even using natural finish materials, and perhaps flexible to become like a nice piece of parchment, returning it to a more naturalish, bookish feel. But I think there will be a collective feeling that we lost something important, sort like how we felt after small town downtowns died after Costco arrived, or when we actually spent more than 5% of our time outside (now the national average).

It is hard to imagine anything nicer than sitting down with a good book in a nice place. I just don't get that feeling about anything electronic.
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Not Costco, Walmart
 
originally posted by Tom Glasgow:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman: Books that have important photos are not accommodated by Kindles.
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For sure not color photos.
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Tom, But probably not for much longer. The Asian company that does most of the ink print displays for the eReaders expects to have color soon...perhaps by the next holiday season.

. . . . . Pete
 
the real challenge for writers is electronic-book readers like the Kindle. He says the increasingly popular devices force people to read books in a different way.

"They scroll and scroll and scroll. You don't have this business of handling pages and turning them and savoring them." Grossman says that particular function of the e-book leads to a certain kind of reading and writing: "Very forward moving, very fast narrative ... and likewise you don't tend to linger on the language. When you are seeing a word or a sentence on the screen, you tend to go through it, you extract the data, and you move on."

Grossman thinks that tendency not to linger on the language also affects the way people react to a book when they are deciding whether to buy it: More purchases will be based on brief excerpts.

"It will be incumbent on novelists to hook readers right away

it's hard to know whether traditional books and the people who read and write them will have much influence on the culture in the future.

The real question is, "Is that segment of the population going to just dwindle and be on the periphery of the culture rather than at the center, which is where printed books have stood for centuries now?"
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How eBooks Will Change Reading and Writing

. . . . . Pete
 
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