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August 1, 2009
Nicholson Baker on Amazon's Kindle
Long story short: Baker bought one, then read stuff on it. His review appears in the new issue (August 3, 2009) of the New Yorker.
Excerpts:
•••••••••••••••••••••
I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one. “Say Hello to Kindle 2,” it said, in tall letters on the main page. If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel “Moonlight Becomes You,” the top line on the page said, “ ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ and over 270,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle—Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more.” Below the picture of Clark’s physical paperback ($7.99) was another teaser: “Start reading ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ on your Kindle in under a minute. Don’t have a Kindle? Get yours here.” If I went to the Kindle page for the digital download of “Moonlight Becomes You” ($6.39), it wouldn’t offer me a link back to the print version. I was being steered.
I began to have the mildly euphoric feeling that you get ten minutes
into an infomercial. Sure, the Kindle is expensive, but the expense is
a way of buying into the total commitment. This could forever change
the way I read. I’ve never been a fast reader. I’m fickle; I don’t
finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then
take it up again. Maybe, I thought, if I ordered this wireless Kindle 2
I would be pulled into a world of compulsive, demonic book consumption,
like Pippin staring at the stone of Orthanc. Maybe I would gorge myself
on Rebecca West, or Jack Vance, or Dawn Powell. Maybe the Kindle was
the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit
to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be
doing more of.
The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it
had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem
was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a
greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface,
Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler
greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.
This was
what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an
overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB
or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered
chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?
Monotype Caecilia was grim and Calvinist; it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words.
The real flurry over the new DX, though, has to do with the fate of newspapers. The DX offers more than twice as much Vizplex as the Kindle 2—about half the area of a piece of letter-size paper—enough, some assert, to reaccustom Web readers to paying for the digital version of, say, the Times, thereby rescuing daily print journalism from financial ruin. “With Kindle DX’s large display, reading newspapers is more enjoyable than ever,” according to Amazon’s Web site.
It’s enjoyable if you like reading Nexis printouts. The Kindle Times ($13.99
per month) lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography—and its
subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical
elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed
names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts,
diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores,
financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for
vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century
and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all
but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.
But, fortunately, if you want to read electronic
books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch
(it costs seventy dollars less than the Kindle 2, even after the
Kindle’s price was recently cut), or buy an iPhone, and load the free
“Kindle for iPod” application onto it. Then, when you wake up at 3 A.M.
and you need big, sad, well-placed words to tumble slowly into the
basin of your mind, and you don’t want to wake up the person who’s in
bed with you, you can reach under the pillow and find Apple’s smooth
machine and click it on. It’s completely silent. Hold it a few inches
from your face, with the words enlarged and the screen’s brightness
slider bar slid to its lowest setting, and read for ten or fifteen
minutes. Each time you need to turn the page, just move your thumb over
it, as if you were getting ready to deal a card; when you do, the page
will slide out of the way, and a new one will appear. After a while,
your thoughts will drift off to the unused siding where the old tall
weeds are, and the string of curving words will toot a mournful toot
and pull ahead. You will roll to a stop. A moment later, you’ll wake
and discover that you’re still holding the machine but it has turned
itself off. Slide it back under the pillow. Sleep.
I’ve done this
with Joseph Mitchell’s “The Bottom of the Harbor” ($13.80 Kindle,
$17.25 paperback) and with Wilkie Collins’s “The Moonstone.” The iPod
screen’s resolution, at a hundred and sixty-three pixels per inch, is
fairly high. (It could be much higher, though. High pixel density, not
a reflective surface, is, I’ve come to believe, what people need when
they read electronic prose.) There are other ways to read books on the
iPod, too. My favorite is the Eucalyptus application, by a Scottish
software developer named James Montgomerie: for $9.99, you get more
than twenty thousand public-domain books whose pages turn with a
voluptuous grace. There’s also the Iceberg Reader, by ScrollMotion,
with fixed page numbers, and a very popular app called Stanza. In
Stanza, you can choose the colors of the words and of the page, and you
can adjust the brightness with a vertical thumb swipe as you read.
Stanza takes you to Harlequin Imprints, the Fictionwise Book Store,
O’Reilly Ebooks, Feedbooks, and a number of other catalogues. A million
people have downloaded Stanza. (In fact, Stanza is so good that Amazon
has just bought Lexcycle, which makes the software; meanwhile,
Fictionwise has been bought by a worried Barnes & Noble.)
Forty
million iPod Touches and iPhones are in circulation, and most people
aren’t reading books on them. But some are. The nice thing about this
machine is (a) it’s beautiful, and (b) it’s not imitating anything.
It’s not trying to be ink on paper. It serves a night-reading need,
which the lightless Kindle doesn’t. And the wasp passage in “Do Insects
Think?” is funny again on the iPod.
The paperback edition of “The
Lincoln Lawyer” ($7.99 at Sherman’s in Freeport) has a bright-green
cover with a blurry photograph of a car on the front. It says “MICHAEL CONNELLY” in huge metallic purple letters, and it has a purple band on the spine: “#1 New York Times
Bestseller.” On the back, it says, “A plot that moves like a shot of
Red Bull.” It’s shiny and new and the type is right, and it has the
potent pheromonal funk of pulp and glue. When you read the book, its
gutter gapes before your eyes, and you feel you’re in it. In print,
“The Lincoln Lawyer” swept me up. At night, I switched over to the
e-book version on the iPod ($7.99 from the Kindle Store), so that I
could carry on in the dark. I began swiping the tiny iPod pages faster
and faster.
••••••••••••••••••••
Regular readers may recall my ode to the Kindle for for iPod app that appeared here on March 4, 2009, with a further appreciation on May 24, 2009.
Like Baker wrote, get an iPod touch (now $215) and you've got a pocketable Kindle — that also happens to be a wonderful computer.
August 1, 2009 at 12:01 PM | Permalink
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