Kindling

A few days ago, Ruth got a Kindle from Amazon - actually, the Kindle was an early birthday present from her mother. We've often talked about getting a Kindle - or a pair of Kindles - but I didn't want to make what I considered an extravagant purchase, figuring that once you got into Kindle culture, you'd basically be repurchasing every book you owned. I'm old enough to remember watching vinyl replaced by cassettes, and cassettes replaced by CDs, and CD replaced by digital media. (I'm still stuck on the CD stage, wanting nothing to do with iTunes.) Likewise, I remember the VCR format wars and then watching as cassette tape was replaced by DVDs. (*)

Here's how the Kindle works, based entirely on the two or three times I've held it in my hands. It's a very thin and light device, less than a quarter of an inch thick. Its dimensions are not much bigger than that of a birthday card. The device does require power - and there's a charging cord - but seemingly, it doesn't seem to require much of it. Apparently, the device is always on, going into "sleep mode" when not in use.

There's a wireless connection. I don't know if it connects to one's home wireless or to a set of towers maintained by Amazon.com, but the device can put you in touch with Amazon's main server of e-books. You can look for an e-book, and purchase it, with your Amazon.com account being credited. The contents of the e-book are then loaded into the Kindle, which can hold up to thousands of books.

So why would one have a Kindle, versus say an actual tangible book?

1) Storage. For every Kindle-ized book you own, it's one less real book that you have to own. If you relocate a lot - or even if you just travel a lot - the amount of books you can take with you is limited by the physical dimensions/weight of the books. If you have a Kindle, you simply take your entire library with you.

2) Cost. This is the funny part of the equation. First, just about every book published before 1920 is in the public domain. This means that copyright on these books cannot be violated. (This was in the days before copyright became a tool for the heirs of prominent creators to obtain free money, forever.) When you look up a public domain book on Kindle, you will find that its download cost is...$0.00! Which means that you can stock your library with the classics at no cost to yourself.

I believe every single book that Ruth has on her Kindle - save one - is a public domain classic. A lot of Jane Austin/Bronte Sisters stuff. All absolutely free. If these books were in dead tree form, they'd require a lot of bookshelf space.

The only one that Ruth had to pay for is an amusing story. Let's assume that you want a free copy of Jane Eyre. It exists. However, when you look up Jane Eyre on Kindle, you'll find not only the free author's copy but a bunch of annotated copies either for student use or for literary criticism. Those books cost money. Ruth's classic was buried under a pile of annotated versions with the same name, and in disgust Ruth bit the bullet and purchased an annotated version.

The other amusing story on cost comes from the fact that no one has figured out the price point of a Kindle-ized book. The reason books cost $20 at the bookstore is that you have to take in the cost of paper, publishing, the yacht storage fees of the CEO of the publishing company, etc. etc. The question then becomes "what is the fair price to charge a Kindle-ized book?" When you look at the prices of non-public domain e-books, they're generally cheaper than the dead tree versions.

Of course, there are some limitations. You're limited to the books that have been converted to e-books form. For example, if you're interested in women's basketball (and who isn't?) you only get the piss-poor collection of women's basketball books that have already been switched over. On the other hand, if you're a John Grisham fan (**) you can probably find his complete works in e-book form for no problem.

This leads to an article on Cracked I read about e-books and the concept of artificial scarcity. If you think about it, in the digital age there is probably nothing easier to copy than a book would be. Give me enough time, and I can create a perfect copy of a book. Even if you decide never to sell your new masterpiece It Was a Dark and Stormy Night in e-book form if I have 1,000 spare hours of free time I could just buy the dead tree copy, open it to Page One, open up a .doc file on my computer - and start typing. By the time I'm done, I have a computerized version that is almost as good as the real one, and for a lot of people it would be "good enough". It would be much more difficult for me to, say, self-copy the latest Franz Ferdinand album (I can't play guitar) or Debbie Does Dallas (no comment).

This opens up the possibility that sooner or later someone will be able to hack the Kindle and you'll be able to duplicate e-books and download them off megauploadtorrentspyware.com. Or be able to shove your own .doc or .pdf files into Kindle, or scans of books, or porn. I can't wait to see how that all plays out.

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(*) - There is a real push from "the industry" to have DVDs replaced by Blu-Ray, but it doesn't seem to be taking hold for the same reason that Betamax never took hold over VHS in the cassette tape days. Yes, the picture and sound were (supposedly) better with Betamax, but there becomes a "good enough" threshhold where you're high enough on the quality curve that any gains beyond the present can only be appreciated by connoisseurs. VHS was "good enough" and people didn't need Betamax. Furthermore, VHS tapes could record six hours of tape compared to two hours for Betamax. Likewise, DVDs are "good enough" for most people and I don't see myself replacing all of my DVDs with Blu-Ray versions.

This is why I obtain most of my music through...YouTube. YouTube is "good enough" for my music listening; a connoisseur would be aghast.

(**) - If you are, you're reading this at the airport on the red-eye waiting for the 6:20 am flight from Denver to New York.