Rekindling Reading?
Some big brains in MediaLand are thinking 'Yes.'
This brain of indeterminate size says 'Are you kidding me?'
The Kindle, Amazon's $400 "wireless reading device" being released to much hype in the marketplace – I mean, a Newsweek cover story? – is reinvigorating the old "future of reading" debate.
The future of reading is an interesting topic, with a couple different angles. There's books, for one, and then there's more temporary print news media.
As far as books are concerned, in an age of portable technology, the concept of somebody downloading a bunch of books into a small little box seems practical. It could do for literature what the iPod did for music. Who doesn't love tucking away those bulky clanky CDs into the closet next to your vinyl? (Wait. Too autobiographical?) Imagine packing up for the beach or a vacation and – instead of packing a few dense books into a bag – just tossing a little box the size of a VHS cassette in, for all your reading needs.
That can work.
But replace or supplement the newspaper market? Because they're small, wireless and can subscribe to newspapers for less than their print rates, Dan Kennedy up in Boston seems to think this could be just the thing newspapers need to turn the economic corner.
The Kindle is hardly the only experiment in paid online content. The Times has something called TimesReader, which costs $15 per month and which, according to Jack Shafer, is much easier on the eyes than the Web site. (No Mac version, so I haven't been able to test it.) But TimesReader requires you to lug your laptop around, which makes the Kindle a much more portable solution.It's been noted often in this space that – luddite-sounding or not – there's something irreplaceable about the newspaper experience. It's not just the tactile sensation of picking up a paper and holding it and turning the page, there's more than that. Even a guy who works for a completely web-based publication like Salon admitted as much a few weeks ago:I do have doubts about the Kindle. It's easy to imagine a Kindle-killer — a similar device that lets you browse the free Web via a WiFi connection and download content so that you can read it even when you're disconnected … The free-content paradigm is powerful, and may prove too difficult to overcome.
But the Kindle does offer a possible alternative to the free, Web-based regime that has been such a boon to consumers and a bane to publishers. I hope the Kindle is at least enough of a success so that we can arrive at some judgments over the next few years.
It's like a shopping mall of news; you don't have to enter every store to have any fun. Just peering in the windows -- scanning the pictures and captions, passing over the headline and pull-quotes and the lead sentence, noting the story's placement -- can be worthwhile.And then there's the economic issue, which Dan Kennedy referred to as "the free-content paradigm." This writer believes that it's more than a paradigm -- it's a market reality. There's a huge difference between free and not free, mental as well as economic. And we're not just discussing the subscription to the electronic version of the newspaper; there's also the initial sunk cost of $400 for the device. (Which you know will go down soon, but by how much?)The print paper perfectly accommodates such shallow regard for certain stories. As you flip through it, you'll see the piece there on the International page and will be able to quickly glean from its design whether it merits your further attention.
All this talk of saving the newspaper by taking the paper out of it sounds a bit like reinventing the wheel. For the past 2000 years, paper has been 'the wheel' of the reading medium. It's simple and it works. But that doesn't keep people from trying to improve upon it. As William Powers wrote in "Why Paper Is Eternal":
Paper is the most successful communications innovation of the last 2000 years, the one that has lasted the longest and had the profoundest effect on civilization. One can easily make the case that without the technology that is paper, there would be no civilization. Yet most of the time, we don't even think of paper as a technology.The Kindle can make an argument for the book audience, but the high threshold cost and the simple experience of reading a paper makes it a much tougher sell for that audience.
Then again, there is the generational argument: Just because we consider something irreplaceable, it's not guaranteed to stay that way. I have long attested that we're probably only a generation or two away from having to insist that Solitaire is a game played with things called "Cards" – kids are so used to clicking their mouse to play it. In much the same way, the things we take for granted now may be oddities and anachronisms down the road.
But for now, I'll straddle that divide, playing solitaire on my laptop and opening up the newspaper. And the Kindle, way off in the distance, might be seen as the crucial first step in the transformation of our reading ways. But it's not going to iPod-ize the written word yet.