Chekhov's Mistress
File Under: The Future of Print
I once said about Sony’s fairly weak entrant into the e-book field that we were still pretty far from a device that would change the way people read, but if Apple designed an e-book then all bets were off. While that doesn’t seem too likely given Steve Job’s comments about Americans not reading, it appears that Amazon’s Kindle is another matter.
On Amazon’s home page today I see reports that they’ve not been able to keep them in stock but have increased production to meet demand. That of course could have been due to very low initial expectations for the product, but if there’s demand now at $400 then there could very will be a lot of demand as the market expands to other players. I think the hook is connectivity. While Sony’s product offered a limited universe and limited connectivity (I don’t think I could have used the product on my Mac, at least when I checked early on), Amazon’s product will quickly grow.
Online reading is getting better too. If you’re on a Mac, check out Times a new feed reader that looks like it may bridge the gap between “traditional” feed readers with their many panes and buttons and the experience of reading a newspaper. Times is for Leopard only, by the way and was just released today so I haven’t given it a thorough work out, but I know that as I replace reading print periodicals with their online counterparts (see my earlier pledge on this), I’m going to want a way to keep up with it all and in a uniformly easy interface, something that most online magazines have yet to figure out on their own.
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: May 02, 2008
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
