QUILLBLOG

Rekindling reading

The current issue of the Columbia Review of Journalism focuses on the future of writing and reading, offering up a spate of interesting writers examining various threads of that theme. Of particular note is The American Prospect associate editor Ezra Klein’s look at the Kindle, Amazon’s new digital book reader. Books may be in decline, he surmises, but people are still reading all the time – we’re glued to our computer screens. So surely the Kindle is onto something?

So I consulted my conscience, which is as much gadget-head as bookworm, and quickly came to a decision: I would simultaneously support reading and the introduction of expensive new electronic devices by buying a Kindle and proudly toting it around town for a month. That would give me time to determine whether this really was the future of reading, or whether the nation remained threatened by grave and unnamed consequences.

But after both admiring and criticizing the Kindle, Klein comes to the conclusion that if the reading revolution will be digitized, it needs to move beyond the typical conventions of the print medium.

At the end of the day, the true advances won’t come in the Kindle, but in the content.

[...]

This may, ultimately, prove to be Amazon’s truly crucial role—not driving the future of reading so much as the future of writing. E-reading technology will push forward even without Amazon’s involvement. The Kindle will soon face stiff competition from a bevy of able competitors. [...] But if the Kindle’s successor or competitors are to succeed, it will be because Amazon used its status as the world’s largest online bookseller to force authors to think seriously about creating content that works better than the book, that goes where the book cannot, that’s interactive and cooperative and open in ways that printed text will never be.

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