Discussion → Electronic Reading
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Marcelle & Roxanne,
ai.org is archiving websites and digitizing books. They are the anti-google and anti-amazon in that they want to make ebooks free and more readily available, in EPUB format that is open-source and free of digital copy management, and readable on the free laptops that are being sent to developing countries. Also available in Daisy format, which can convert to Braille.
Check out this post:
http://followthereader.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/the-day-it-all-changed/
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Oh man Roxane, I never thought about the gym. A kindle/nook would be clutch. I end up resorting to wearing my glasses and super bending the binding in order to keep my books open when I read.
I know the economics of ebooks is more complicated that a layperson would think, but I still feel like they should be cheaper. In the end, I think they will be ($5 maybe?) and then the whole thing would really take off.
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I really doubt that books will be eliminated by e-readers, and in the worst case scenario, the libraries which have always been the poor man's education will merely switch from books to readers so that no one will be denied reading rights and access.
I don't have the luxury of a reader, but do have a laptop and there are so many sites that offer the classics (Gutenberg Project, Short Stories, Literature Network, etc.) that I don't feel left out of fine reading. And of course, for some of the best in short stories and poetry, I read right here at Fictionaut. ;-)
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the future of reading?
i think in the future all reading will be outsourced to china--
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Ben, one day I was at the gym, straining to read my book on the treadmill and I thought, wait a minute! I can use my Kindle. I brought it the next day and it has been so wonderful every since. It really allows me to get reading in tht I would not otherwise have time for.
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I'm interested in this at the gym thing--my head is always wabbling when I bring a book or magazine and it takes me 2x as long to read as usual, and usual is already kinda slow. Font size and not needing hands would help that.
I read "Bartelby" online this weekend and while the text was a pleasure, part of me kept going "come on, come on" to the scroll bar. It's a really long story and reading it on one page made me feel inefficient somehow. At some point, my computer wired me to associate laptop/internet with (1) getting my work done and (2) reading a lot of things quickly, and when something asks me to break out of that and slow down, my brain resists it.
But books are books and they're supposed to take a long time, so it's okay when they do. Even word docs and pdfs, to a lesser extent, make me feel like it's okay to read them for longer. Probably because I spend a lot of time in word docs and have created that space for myself.
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I have friend who reads in airports and on planes on a weekly basis. We swap books a lot. He just started Alice Munro's newest collection. I told him I wanted to read it when he finished it. Alas, he's gone over to a Kindle. I doubt we'll be discussing what he reads any longer. On a microlevel, a link, a line of personal communication has now been broken. Oh well, progress. Something new will come from it all, something good, or at least interpreted as good. It reminds me of how shock-jock radio and, later, the Internet wiped out the art of telling jokes. Did anyone notice the passing of that? Why tell a joke when the listener stops you, saying "I read that one yesteday"?
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This NPR story was featured today, and I thought it would be of interest: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122822760&sc=fb&cc=fp
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Thanks Katrina for posting this. I like how Weiner suggests that the book will always have more than sentimental value - that its practical value lies in its ability to hold our attention more completely (or at least in a different way) than a computer screen.
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so glad people continue to post in this thread cuz otherwise i might not have discovered it. i don't own a kindle and i don't think i ever will if only because i need to scale down financially to get more time to write...
this one cracked me up - it's kind of old but still relevant. what cracked me up too in a desperate way were the amazon kindle ads surrounding the video! take that for our new world!
link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aQ8pWAVeZU
and for a look at the personal effects of online reading: watch jeff bezos on the charlie rose show - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09TIJk0vSRg - i've shown this to my students since it came out. if this is the most likely equivalent to the 'female' amazon kindle commercial, where's all the virility of jack kerouac gone?
i'm really way more ambivalent than this sounds. i've owned every new tech gadget of the last 20 years. i've broken them all within 3 months so that insurance companies run away from me if i as much as show my face.
perhaps more importantly, at least for the active e-reading-and-privacy-issues debate in europe is the fact that kindle users will leave an up to date page by page and annotation by annotation digital fingerprint of all their reading in the amazon database. which is, of course, as secure as all the other data about us on the net. go figure, don quichotte. wind mill time!
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We're an online literary journal that publishes works of short, indeterminate prose and accompanying criticism. We feature one author every posting period (every two weeks). Every so often a question related to the form and function of fiction will be posted here for discussion.
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