Amazon Kindle : Plain Excellence

The Amazon Kindle has to be one of the rawest forms of electronic reading I have experienced since I first tried with the Handspring Visor. The delivery of the unit confuses with its packaging which gives the recipient a Matryoshka Doll  feeling when opening one box to discover another similar box inside. The unsettling experience does not end there since the units instructions printed  so brazenly upon the screen are indeed printed on the screen a fact no less reducing in its boldness by the removal of the plastic cover on which you expect the words to have been printed. The last swing which pitches the experience out of the familiar ball park of new gadget love is the lack of computing asisstance required to configure the unit as the owner. Unlike iPads and iPhones and other such slabbed devices the Kindle rejects the premise that all new devices must first be pillaged and enslaved to a computing platform.   If after all of this you are not unhinged by the non gadget performance and the otherworldy feel of the screen then you settle down into a chair and with a little delving and clicking your discovering that books are on  that first stage of digital  apotheosis having been granted a device which puts the ‘e’ in easy reading.

There are many that will point out that ebooks ( surely we should call them b for bits or bytes not e for electronic ? oh well ! )  from the realms of Amazon are like unto super market shopping trolleys. Serving a single purpose for the proprietor and encumbered with security and locking mechanisms that ensure eager consumers avoid adopting them. They are in fact quite correct this experience is exactly limiting and restrictive however just as I dont bring my own trolley to a super market nor do I expect convenience without cost.

Should people buy a Kindle ? Sadly yes I feel they should because the medium in this instance is not the message and whilst the platform and rights wars are prolonged so the consumer will see an ever widening split of product , availability and price as publishers deliver ever more creative ways to justify higher prices.

Thats all for now, feel free to flame me if you think I am wrong .

Thanks for reading.

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2 Comments on “Amazon Kindle : Plain Excellence

  1. The device is already enslaved to Amazon, it does not need to be enslaved to an OS. It is a book renting device, nothing more.

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