November 19th, 2007
IMHO: Amazon Kindle drum roll another example of digerati clustercluck
You know the real word I wanted to type but my Mom raised a gentleman.
I’m in my hotel lobby, forced to this noisy public place (kisses between three generations of anonymous families) because the WiFi is down and the hotel is clueless about what the problem is.
I’ve just read the new Newsweek’s cover story on the Amazon Kindle. Newsweek, as well as most other bloggers whose sites I’ve checked, are raving about this latest incarnation of an e-book reader.
Cannot say I have tried this, but having heard all this before, mark me down as skeptical.
The price is $399 for Kindle, and a rather economical $9.99 a pop for most books. Download is over-the-air, which eliminates one barrier to entry.
So far so good. But I have to tell you that all the digerati’s collective swooning forces me to consider the source of the swooning.
So many times have the digerati swooned, and the devices they swooned over have failed to transition to a mass audience. That’s a personality flaw of the digerati. They-we-spend too much time talking to ourselves and not the common folk in Circuit City and Wal-Mart. Heck, most of us (not including the fellow typing this) even go to these places.
And what would we find if we did?
Folks for whom $399, plus tax, is better spent on something more immediate. Gasoline. Heating bills. A flight to the grandparents for Thxgiving. Heck, maybe even aAn iPhone.
And/or, a Sue Grafton novel on a hand-held portable device that never needs recharging.
That’d be a well, paperback book.
As Bob Seger once sang, “call me old-fashioned, call me over the hill,” but give me my dead tree book.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
