Gentlemen,Like Brother Colin aka Count Von Pluma I too have been spending rather a lot of my time over the past few weeks on Amazon.com; purchasing Christmas gifts for friends and family whilst wearing nothing more than a pair of hand-made Mongolian silk boxers...and sometimes nothing but the suit that God gave me!
During one of my numerous visits to the website I came across Amazon's new "e-book" reading device, called Kindle. I read the descriptions, checked out the specs, and watched some of the short video clips. I have to say that I was impressed at how cool the Kindle looked and performed. The fact that no matter where you are, you can download any book, magazine, blog, or newspaper in less than 30 seconds without a subscription, seems pretty darn sweet to me.
However, the real question about this device, and whether it will be successful has nothing to do with how it looks or performs; it's about breaking the mold, and forcing people to do what previous attempts have failed at, making people read a book on screen.
Here is a quote from a very interesting article I happened upon during my research for this post, which I think makes a good point, "The reason the iPod took off is that music was never meant to be a “thing” in the first place. It was born as pure sound, and pure sound is what it has returned to. But books were always physical objects, and the printed book as a piece of technology has yet to be improved upon. And won’t. Certainly not by something that looks like a prop from Charlie’s Angels and has, are you ready, a whopping ONE typeface."
As a tribe of men bonded by our love for all things parchment, I was curious to hear how everyone in the group feels about e-books in general, and whether or not we should make steps to ban their use in the MOP?!?
