Fear the Kindle

I got a Kindle, I like the Kindle, but it is far from perfect. It doesn’t disappear in my hands, and it would be rather inconvenient if it did. If I “curled up with” a book, i.e. fell asleep on it, I’d not have to worry about waking up with a broken book.

The book industry is going to be radically diminished by the fact that fewer people read (anything, not just books). With Kindle (and like devices) a publisher doesn’t have to make a guess about how many copies of a work will be purchased, nor does a work ever have to “go out of print”. Big advantages for everyone except the printing press owner (which people need to soon distinguish from “publisher”.)

On the other hand the Kindle doesn’t make it easy to organize your books (unless you only have 8 of them). It needs some sort of folder/tagging mechanism to categorize things so you don’t have to scroll through a seemingly endless list.

I don’t like the DRM aspects, but that just serves to hurt Amazons business as I’ll mostly purchase things (subscriptions) and avail myself of free content to avoid the issue.

Once there are a variety of similar devices in wide use it would be nice for a standard to be developed that allows a copyrighted work to be purchased once and travel from one device to another (same owner). I suggest the geerheads start working on such a thing now.