The Kindle is the next big thing on the electronic gadgetry front. For any who do not know, it is an electronic device, similar to an ipod or blackberry, which holds entire books as text files and displays them on a screen for you to read. Its like a small tablet, and you can scroll down as you read. The storage capacity is such that it will hold thousands of book-files, and the battery supposedly will last for days of reading before needing to be plugged in. According to the manufacturers, the screen can be set to glow, so you can read in the dark, but it has anti-glare and other technology which is supposedly easier on your eyes than a conventional computer screen. The Kindle is being sold through Amazon.com, and they are also distributors of the book-files, thousands of titles of which are available, from classic literature to new pulp fiction, for fairly low prices. The Kindle is stirring up quite a fuss in the book world and electronics world alike, and many are comparing its impending revolution with the digitization and dissemination issues of audio media through mp3 files.

The Kindle does have many advantages. It is small, compact, sturdy, and indeed is infinitely more space economical than any physical book could ever be, in terms of words per inch or ounce. If you are going on vacation, one kindle in your luggage would replace any amount of novels you could hope to finish reading while sunning on the Caribbean beach. The number of novels it could hold is in the thousands, so if you tired of one genre of writing, you could easily flip to another, again cutting down on storage space for all those books. If you are a student of literature, it would mean no more backpacks stuffed with novels carried about from class to class – as long as you could get the ones you needed in kindle files. It has a note-taking feature, so you can make notes as you read, recording your thoughts or observations in a footnote style attached to the text. Then again, you have all your material in one place together, and easy to transport. There is no doubt that the Kindle has its good side.

It also has some drawbacks, however. The Kindle is attached to Amazon.com as a device and also in its content. That means, you can only get your book-files from Amazon, at the moment at least. This is a dangerous system in terms of access to diverse information, opinions, content etc. In future, publishers may offer kindle book-files directly, allowing for a range of material sources as wide as there are now for books, but for now Amazon sits on all that control by itself. Think Big Brother. Because all content comes from Amazon, it effectively still is under their control, even once loaded onto your device. If there is a problem with a file, a copyright issue for instance… or perhaps, a censorship issue?…. Amazon has the capability to remove that file from your Kindle, automatically, without warning. It would take all your saved notes along with it. This is an uncomfortable possibility for many.

Size and eye strain is also an issue. Anyone who has ever spent a day working in front of a computer knows it is not easy on the eyes, and no matter what the Kindle manufacturers say, you are still staring at a screen, and a very small one at that. The lowest price format Kindle at the moment has a screen 6 inches in diameter. That is certainly smaller than most paperback books. Presumably you can increase the font size, but then you decrease the word count on the screen, and would need to scroll more often…which can be annoying. Font options are also very limited, although that may change in time – so you must be a fan of Ariel and times to enjoy this technology, until kindle software can expand to allow diversity in design and layout.

We do not know how stable this technology will be over time. Will this device, like all others, need to be replaced or updated every 2 or 3 years? Will the cost of doing that outweigh the low price of the book-files, evening out the overall cost to match that of paperback novel purchases over the same amount of time? Books are made of paper, admitedly a fragile material, but it is by no means certain that digital files are more stable than ink on paper. The world still holds books over 500 years old, but will the same be said of digital files in the same amount of time? What does that say for the archival needs of civilization as a whole?

I believe that the Kindle will have its place in the realm of books and reading. Its advantages are appealing to many, and it would be folly to write off a new technology with such benefits simply for the sake of nostalgia for the texture of books. As we have seen with mp3s files and players, it is inevitable that the media will be overtaken by the medium, and finding a way to work along with that, as such musicians as Radiohead and U2 have done by taking control of the release of their own content, is a much better way to approach the new technology than ineffective resistance and control. Users will find a way to disseminate the content themselves, and this will hurt those who profit from the distribution. When text files are so easy to share, publishers and novelists will suffer. In fact, publishers may become obsolete altogether, and authors may begin to distribute their own content and cut out the middle-person. This could be a good or a bad effect, but it will need to be reckoned with either way.

I would not be surprised if, in time, the kindle replaced the paperback novel. Our society embraces and relies on digital technology more every year, and it serves us well, for the most part. For those of you who appreciate the feel and sensation of books, as many do, the disappearance of the physical object will be hard to accept. But books won’t disappear altogether, I think, and the electronic device may have some positive side effects for our beloved paper and ink friends. Books will become more rare, and more appreciated, I believe. Instead of being common, taken for granted objects, ignored because of their utilitarian nature, books will be freed to evolve as art objects, as objects of collection, desire, beauty and uselessness. There is no denying that people who love books love them for their beauty, rarity, and tactile presence. When novels no longer have to be cheapened to compete with each other, when pulp fiction and common content is available digitally, the book object can rise to an art form, and be appreciated and heaped with as much expensive production, fine materials, and lavish design as wished.

I believe that common fiction and useful non-fiction will be better served by the Kindle, for reasons of accessibility and portability, but volumes of art, criticism, special interest, even history and memoir, not to mention antiquarian volumes, will still occupy the sphere of the physical. I look forward, with some anxiety but also great curiosity, to what will evolve from the possibilities opened by the Kindle. I will cherish my books always, and even more once they are endangered, and I feels certain others will too, and books will never die.