Bigger Kindle…

Updated on June 11, 2009 By Ken Begg 14 Comments

I’m not sure if anyone’s planning to buy one of these, but here’s a link anyway.  I personally am not in the market for a $500 item right now.  Still, I’m at an age where the larger screen makes this a MUCH more attractive gadget than it was with the six-inch screen.  Turn it sideways and boost the font size and reading a novel (or an insanely long review) on this thing could actually be workable, assuming they work like I’ve heard they do.

I will say, it amazes me how thin these things are. I wonder if they would sell better to skittish folks if you could buy some sort of insurance package for it? Of course, then whenever you had the next generation Kindle come out I guess you’d have a ton of people accidentally dropping theirs in the bathtub or something.

The library will be getting one of these (probably the smaller one) to pass around for the staff to look at. Guess I’ll have a better idea then.

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  • Ericb

    Unfortunatly I love books … the cover art, the smell of new paper, having piles of them laying around my apartment. It will be a long time before I get one of these.

  • Eric —

    I agree. And “unfortunately,” nothing, books are great. I’ve been saying for years that Kindles and other readers will only equal or surpass physical books after a generational change. Kindles are nudging things along, but I think that’s still largely true.

    I often work the Young Adult desk here in the library, which is a section basically for jr. high schoolers. You wouldn’t believe the gigantic, incredibly heavy backpacks (the clunks they make when they drop them!) these little kids carry to and fro from school each day.

    Sooner or later they’ll be able to download all their textbooks onto a Kindle or something like it. Then, having grown up using these devices, they’ll come to prefer them and their strong points, which are basically utilitarian, the same way our generation prefers the esthetic, tactile advantages of a paper and ink book. Just as the Internet is replacing newspapers, even if I like to buy one and do the crossword over breakfast. Eventually, though, reading actual books might just be something mostly luddites and hipsters do, like those who prefer turntable record albums.

  • I’m not quite as ready to give up on books. I see things like kindle mostly supplementuing books, not replacing them. I would gladly give up the “textural” advantage of a book for a more useful search function, but I can’t yet see how kindle can let me flip through pages rapidly, looking for what i want or need. I don’t like needing batteries with my book, and I don’t like not being able to leave my book on the beach for a sec (not all my books are treasured herilooms). I’m not unwilling to make the change some day but I am still suspecious that kindle might be to books what the video phone was to phones – something unneeded and unwanted for lo, these 30 years.

  • Sandy, I completely understand and sympathize with many of your arguments. Again, though, it’s only a matter of time until kids start being issued a Kindle-like device for their schoolbooks. Add in the built-in wifi feature and I just think that’s who kids are going to access information and do pleasure reading (to the extent they do). That might not even start for another ten years, and then again it will be a generational change, but it just seems likely the way things will go.

  • When I tried to annotate and underline on a kindle it didn’t work very well, (the screen did not take ink well at all) so I am sticking with paper for now.

    Not to mention the points other made, the feel, the smell, the look of books. And the fact that my copy of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example, has never once needed new batteries.

  • Actually, I don’t know if this will replace books or not. It seems to me more like the Segway than the cell phone, something getting a lot of hype from “futurists”, but which the market shows to have lukewarm interest at best.

    I can see some people using it, maybe a few becoming die hard fans, but I don’t see it replacing books anytime soon. Nor do I think books will be relegated to Luddites in the foreseeable future, not even in five or six generations. (You need to recall, beyond the acceptance here in the US, you are talking about Sierra Leon and Ivory Coast and Malaysia and Samoa and Chad and so on. I just don’t see it. And if the world doesn’t sign on, all the techno-hipsters in the US won’t make it happen. And if books are being printed for the five billion plus who don’t live in the US, or the US and western Europe, I think it likely they will continue being printed for the US as well.)

  • I should note I am talking a ways down the line. Maybe ten years until the educational systems is forced let kids start downloading textbooks, and then 20 years after that for there to be generation that largely grew up reading materials via that method. So I don’t expect books to being nudged aside in my lifetime.

  • sardu

    They’re working on displays that will actually be as thin and flexible as actual paper- you could fold them up and put them in your pocket; you could even make them into clothing. It’s quite a ways off I’m sure but that will be the way to go.

  • Pilgrim

    While I’m sure something like this will eventually largely replace books (at least as far as everyday reading goes), I don’t see it happening in the near future. Until you can get a reader that is A) lightweight and portable, B) has a large enough library of titles, and C) costs about as much as 4-5 paperback books or less, you won’t see mass adoption. We’ve largely got point A down, no idea how well we’re doing on B, but point C is the sticking point. If books are going to be cheaper for the average person, they’ll never have a reason to adopt this or any other EBook reader.

    That said, I’ve read a few books over at Project Gutenberg. There is something to be said for being able to browse a huge library of books, some of which might be rare or out of print, and pick one up on the fly without ever having to leave the comfort of your home. Being able to basically buy any book at will and read it, whether you live in the big city or (like me) Podunk, MI, is a nice selling point. We have a long way to go though before this technology lives up to its potential.

  • $500!?!?!??

    Good Lord, I don’t think my entire library costs that much. I might as well buy a whole new laptop for the same price.

  • Petoht

    Oh, point B was achieved ages ago. I can’t speak for the Kindle, but I have a PDA with Microsoft Reader installed (it’s actually a pretty good program). Books are relatively tiny (Romeo and Juliet is 244kb) in that format, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of my 1 gig SD card.

    SD cards (to say nothing of micro-SD cards) are small and thin enough to work with a Kindle-sized device. Those cards cost roughly $15, so the costs of storage have already been obtained. It’s just a matter of getting the cost of the device down.

    And letting them use non-proprietary formats. I’m looking at you, Sony.

  • John Nowak

    I’ve been using e-books for a king time; I’ve read .PDBs on my Palm, converted from Guttenberg texts and (really) reviews from Ken and others.

    I’ll second Pethot — War and Peace is only around three megabytes, and you can buy a fistful of 2 gig SD cards for a few bucks each.

    I’ve presently got a Sony e-book which I bought a few years ago. It can read RTF format documents from an SD card, so I haven’t really needed to buy much for it. I’ll be trying the Kindle application for my iPhone to get my toe in the water with that technology.

    I don’t believe ebooks will ever replace books entirely; unlike vinyl records or CDs over MP3, printed books have a lot of objective advantages over ebooks: they’re cheap enough to be almost disposable, they don’t break when you drop them, and they don’t use batteries. Of course, my grandfather once said that while he was winding his watch…

  • BeckoningChasm

    I love the smell and texture of books. That said, I love my Kindle (I have version 2). I’ve read more books since buying it than in the previous six months, just because it’s possible to carry around a library’s worth of books in something the size of a pocket calendar.

    As a reader, I typically have anywhere from three to eight books that I’m in the midst of, switching back and forth between them as the mood strikes. With the Kindle, this is much easier to do.

    I don’t believe the Kindle will replace books. It makes them much more available, actually. In the same way that DVDs make movies more affordable and more widespead. (Ken, you and I both remember the pre-VCR days. If you missed the film in the theatre, you waited until it was edited for television–if ever.)

    Three months ago, I would have said, “Kindle? Why would I want such a thing?” I could not imagine a use for it. As I said, now that I have one, I love it.

  • SuperVepr

    I bought the Kindle 2 a couple of months ago and I couldn’t be happier. It does, in fact, rock.