Notes On A Revolution

My thought process when ordering a Kindle was, if I am to be honest, informed by more than one bottle of the City Wine Shop’s finest. I’d been umming and ahhing for a while about it, and figuring that my future involved more traveling rather than less, and especially having tired of of paying hundreds of dollars to ship books around the world with me, something had to give.

There’s no shortage of first impressions and break-downs of Kindles out there, and I’m not particularly interested in writing one of those. I will say the screen is actually extraordinary, you really do have to see it to understand what it loos like. Because it looks like text or an image printed in black ink on some kind of not too unfamiliar surface (f you’re interested in what it actually is and how it works, here’s the Wikipedia page).

The curious thing for me is what it decidedly isn’t. Namely, it decidedly, very purposely is not an iPad. People will argue that an iPad competes with the Kindle but nobody will argue that a Kindle competes with the iPad. It is a digital device purpose-built for the display of text. Think about that - in 2011. Not for multiple types of media, for text (it displays images, but that’s not what you would use it for). It actually causes my brain to explode a little.

Now there is some limited web-browsing functionality, and, in a move I thought was quite cool, it displays any text & image items from Instapaper with no problems. So the longer-form text pieces I opt to not read on my iPhone are quite capably handled there.

Ultimately the thought that is occupying my mind most is “will this impact my consumption of books, newspapers and magazines the way the iPod impacted my consumption of music?”. I bought my first iPod in much the same way, almost as an after-thought, in 2004 or 2005. The funny thing is I still took all my CDs with me everywhere I went, for a while anyway. And I guess that is the crux of the issue.

A pile of CDs in someone’s house now looks rather quaint and decidedly not of this era. But a wall full of books can make a room! At least they can now, the way an obviously robust music collection did (for me anyway) half a decade ago.

Right now my Kindle resembles nothing more than the world’s smallest empty book shelf, as the book I’m part of the way through just isn’t available on it. And that’s really where the trick is going to lie, because to imagine a world where you need a certain kind of book shelf to hold a certain type of book is just ludicrous. Imagine if the original iPod had only been able to play music from iTunes - it’s hard to imagine it having quite the same impact.

I’ve no doubt Amazon have people working around the clock on this, and I hope they get it right. If this has even half the impact that my iPod had, it will amount to nothing short of a revolution in an industry that desperately needs it.