A Thousand Books in My Pocket

Online bookseller, Amazon, has got the bibliophiles all a-quiver with excitement with its announcement that the Kindle will be sold internationally from mid-October. For those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, the Kindle is a digital book reading device, rather like the clay tablets of ancient times in size and look but electronic and able to store over a thousand books plus mp3s as well as blogs and digital newspapers and magazines. So far, it’s only been available in the US so this next phase is very exciting for book lovers all over the world.

I use the term “book” loosely, of course. Those book lovers who love physical books will not be excited at all by the Kindle on the basis that it lacks all the tactile qualities they love about “real” books - paper, page turning etc. But those who love the content of books and love the idea of being able to carry a thousand books in their pocket, the Kindle is the next big thing.

I fall into the latter group for various reasons:

I’m lazy and feeble and I like the idea of holding one compact tablet that I can read lying down as well as sitting up.

I like the idea of being able to carry a range of books around with me but without the weight of the physical books to give me backache and arm ache.

I like the idea of the text-to-speech facility so that I can load the full text of a book and have it read to me while I sit on the bus. The digital voice might be quite irritating, however - so it will all depend on how life-like it sounds

However, I’m not going to jump in with my credit card immediately as I have some reservations:

I believe the Kindle ties you to buying all your ebooks from Amazon, in a Kindle-specific format. What happens when my Kindle dies - as inevitably it will, like all electronic devices? I guess I’ll have to shell out for another one - we’ll all start having to think of books like music: but with mp3s or CDS, I can buy my player from any supplier, not just the one company. With the Kindle, am I now stuck forever having to buy it from Amazon?

I still need to be convinced by the screen quality and how quickly it refreshes when you turn the page - I had a look at the Sony Reader and what put me off is that the screen turns black for a second before it opens onto the next page: ugh.

It’s a pretty steep price at US$279.

I remain to be convinced about it’s usefulness outside the US. At the moment, a huge number of e-books from other ebook sites which are available to US buyers are not available to non-US customers due to geographical rights restrictions. Also, if you look at US Audible.com compared to UK Audible.co.uk, the number of audiobooks available in the UK is a lot less than those available in the US - and in particular, major latest releases in the US are glaringly missing from the UK list. I haven’t been able to find anything definitive on the Amazon.com site that gives me any clarity either way about geographical rights restrictions - can anyone help me with this question?

Speaking of geographical rights restrictions, the Kindle will not be available in some countries, including Malaysia - see the list of no-Kindle countries. So my litblogger, book loving friends there are still stuck with the tree-pulp versions of books - although Amazon did reply to blogger Sharon Bakar’s email query to them to say that maybe, perhaps, sometime in the future, the Kindle might become available there…

What about you? Are you going to get a Kindle? Or are you a hard and fast paperbook person?

Photo: thanks to jink (Derek) on Flickr.com (CCL)