Was it not a sign of the times that Dan Brown’s latest bestseller The Lost Symbol sold more of the Kindle version in the first two days than the hardback version. Admittedly, the Kindle version was cheaper ($9.99 compared with the hefty price of $29.95 for the hard copy). Yet this is still an expression of the significant shift from printed books to electronic books.
In case you don’t know, the Kindle is an electronic device put out by Amazon to download and read just about anything you can think of from its 350,000 volume library of books and magazines. Once downloaded, the reader owns that copy and can read it when they want, as many times as they want. The device is just five inches by eight by .3 inches in size and boasts that the battery will last days before a recharge is needed.
Some were no doubt scared away by the initial price tag of $400, yet Amazon now says it will sell nearly 200,000 units by the end of the year. The price has now dropped 35% to $259, $279 for the international version. And for those concerned about the machine crashing and losing the books they have purchased, Amazon promises that the books are backed up on their servers.
Though the type size of the Kindle can be adjusted, Amazon has now come out with the Kindle 2, the larger version of the eBook reader. It has a 9.7 inch diagonal screen, close to the size of notebook paper. It too is just .3 inches thick, has an equally impressive battery life, and contains 3.3 gigs of memory (up to 3,500 books storage). The Kindle 2 sells for $489 at present. Both units have a read aloud feature though the voice is certainly inferior to the quality of a professionally done audiobook.
Neither Kindle is dependent on a Wi-Fi network to get access to the library, for they operate on a 3G network like a cell phone. As their ad states, a reader can literally hear about a book and be reading it in less than a minute in 16 shapes of gray on the Kindle. You can actually get magazines or newspapers before they are on the newsstand. A nifty feature is its access to an online dictionary. If the reader finds an unfamiliar word in a text he is reading, the scroll wheel can be used to select it and look up the meaning.
Apple has entered the competition with a free iPhone or Touch application called Stanza with which an owner has access to a number of book sources including both free books and best sellers. The Barnes & Noble eReader is similar, though, at last report, their e-Books are not priced competitively. An application called Kindle for iPhone is also available. The Touch and iPhone are not as large as even the smaller Kindle but the monitor is in color (which helps with pictures and some charts), the type size can also be adjusted, and, for about the same price, the Touch can do much more than just provide books.
On the negative side, e-Book readers do have disadvantages. For example, though you paid for a book, you are not allowed to share it with others as you could a printed book. It is convenient to have so many books available at any time, but you can’t write in the margins or give it as a gift. You can never be too far from a power source, and, its cost means you have lost a great deal more if it is lost of stolen than you would lose in one book. You never again need to buy a large print version of anything, but neither can you pass on priceless volumes to future generations. (Imagine Princess Bride beginning with the grandfather reading a Kindle version of the story!)
Paper and ink books many decline in popularity, but it will be a long time before purists will concede them as being a worthy replacement. The smell and feel of a book is simply not replaceable by an electronic machine.
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