Here’s another piece by someone slamming the Kindle because it turns out that a cheap netbook computer can act as an e-reader, too!
Happily, the assertion is fully refuted by the accompanying photo. Why, yes! Tilting a laptop sideways to read a book is a perfectly natural and attractive thing to do!
Hey, know what? I can listen to my music collection on my laptop, too. But you don’t see me wandering around town with headphones on and my laptop tucked under my arm.
The Kindle is useful because it does for books what the iPod did for music. It creates a stylish (well, the Kindle 2 does, anyway) and convenient way to read your books or listen to your music.
Why is this so hard for some people to understand?
Some have a problem with the iPod/iPhone because it can be conceptually reduced to a fancy miniature hard drive, so I am not surprised to hear this criticism of Kindles being glorified laptops/tablets. To many, stylishness is not worth paying a premium, particularly in this economy when many consumers are spending less.
Another issue is that luxury devices tend to devalue media. This is an issue with all digital media, but I think premium “players” accelerate erosion of the perceived value of digital media. If you pay more for the player, you should pay even less for the stuff it plays, right? After all, packaged goods (print books, etc) cost more to manufacture and ship. Also, the damn player cost me so much stuff it plays should be virtually free, right?
As a writer and musician, I believe content maintains intrinsic worth when separated from a physical product. But I can see where consumers devalue content, and where vendors collude by pricing digital media as a common commodity (Apple’s 99 cent or free store). In the transition to digital media distribution, the old guard distribution remains in the value chain without adding any value. The old music biz (and the old publishing biz) say they’re only looking out for artists, which is complete bullshit.
It should follow that the consumer gets a fair value for the real distribution savings but the artist gets fair value for their work, and the obsolete physical distribution system, which adds no value whatsoever, gets nothing. But that’s not what happens. Instead, the consumer is more excited about the player than the media, looking only for cheap or free content. Ath the extreme, this leads to hypocritical stances on both sides of superdistribution/piracy debate.
What if the Kindle or the iPod were free, and consumers paid for the content, which subsidized the cost of the hardware? Yes, that could be the end game, but I think the media suffers a loss of perceived value in the process. Just sayin’
Great points, Billy, particularly about consumers devaluing digital content. There’s definitely some truth there in the digital music and video space, where you are only limited by your bandwidth and tenacity in googling torrent sites for free stuff. That seems to be less of a problem in the book space, probably mainly because e-readers are about where MP3 players were 10 years ago — a nice proof of concept, but hardly mainstream.
Speaking of e-readers struggling to break into the mainstream, it struck me that they differ from MP3 players in one crucial regard: the ability to easily convert your existing physical library into something completely digital. Everyone has stacks of CDs and if you buy an MP3 player, it’s just a matter of spending an afternoon or two (for most people) ripping the CDs on to your hard drive. But we don’t have devices that can scan and digitize whole books in just a few minutes. There’s no way to get your existing book library on to your device except by paying Amazon more money for a digital version. Of course, books and music differ in that you can listen to a CD dozens or hundreds of times but most of rarely re-read even our favorite books more than a handful of times.