UnPrecedented » Kindle has arrived. Long live the book!

Kindle has arrived. Long live the book!

Posted on November 22, 2007 by Beverley Sullivan under About Precedent

I’ve been a bookworm for as long as I can remember. My shelves at home are groaning under the weight of books that go back to my early reading days. They’re starting to stack up on the floor too. I have a ‘to read’ stack, a ‘must re-read stack’, a ‘recently read’ stack and several random stacks.

So ‘Kindle’ should be the answer to my prayers, and save me from having to move house within the next year or so too.

Amazon’s new ‘ipod of reading’ is an amazing idea. Downloading books, blogs and newspapers onto a single device which you can carry around with you and buy the instant you want to should be my idea of heaven. I need never run out of reading matter again. I can be reading the next Richard Flanagan or Margaret Atwood the minute it’s launched, even if I’m miles from a bookstore.

But…

Where I was quite happy to relegate my CD collection to a drawer and leave my CD player untouched in favour of my ipod, I attach far more sentimentality to books. CDs are plasticky and nasty; books are tactile, they ooze wisdom and experience, they smell fantastic, they’re design objects in their own right. The perfect combination of paper and type and image makes each book distinctive. A well designed and printed book is a wonderful thing. Reading books on a screen that claims to look like paper, using a wheel to scroll and running out of power just at the most important bit just doesn’t appeal to me at all. And how will I lend a book to my friends saying ‘you must read this!’?

And is it just me or does it look UGLY?

http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA
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1 Comment so far

Andrew Travers on November 29th, 2007

It’s not just you.

Daring Fireball had an excellent post on the stupidity of considering design as something that can be addressed down the line.

As it quotes Steve Jobs as saying:

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Couldn’t agree more.