Will the Kindle Change the Face of Publishing?

Written by Grace Kao
COURTESY OF THE NEW YORKER ONLINE

Picture source: dailycontributor.com

Now if I were a big-shot in the publishing industry - say, an editor, or a literary agent - I would totally see why you would get a Kindle 2. Why mow down forests of trees simply to print out unfinished manuscripts? Not only is the Kindle 2 more earth-friendly (supposedly), but it's simply more convenient to be able to carry an entire desk's worth of manuscripts in your purse.

But I'm not a hotshot editor, or agent, or even a writer. (Sadly.) I'm simply a person who loves to read. And when Amazon first came out with the Kindle, I have to admit, I scoffed: "Who would want to read on that? It won't look anything like paper."

Amazon sold 500,000 units in 2008, and experts are estimating anywhere from $750 million - $1 billion (!!) in sales by 2010. Of course, those are estimates, but I would say the Kindle & its latest incarnation, the Kindle2, have been doing all right. Baker, from The New Yorker, had even more to say about the impact of the Kindle:

Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important—that it was an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization. In the Wall Street Journal, the cultural critic Steven Johnson wrote that he’d been alone one day in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, when he was seized by the urge to read a novel. Within minutes, thanks to Kindle’s free 3G hookup with Sprint wireless—they call it Whispernet—he was well into Chapter 1 of Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty” ($9.99 for the e-book, $10.20 for the paperback). Writing and publishing, he believed, would never be the same. In Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, confided that for weeks he’d been doing all his recreational reading on the Kindle 2, and he claimed that it offered a “fundamentally better experience” than inked paper did. “Jeff Bezos”—Amazon’s founder and C.E.O.—“has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution,” Weisberg said. “Printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.”

But as Baker himself was to find out, the Kindle couldn't entirely replace the good old-fashioned paper&ink book-model. For one, the Kindle displays only in shades of gray and is not backlit (the engineers of the e-paper model believing that backlit liquid crystal displays are bad for the eyes, which they probably are) - but this makes it hard to read in low-light OR high-light situations. In the sun, the words on the Kindle even fade.

Secondly, you can't really get pictures on the Kindle. I mean, you can get them, but they'll probably suck. There are only 16 shades... of gray. The image quality on a Kindle is nothing like that of, say, an iPod touch, and you can only enlarge so much before the resolution is completely shot. So that rules out half the whimsy and fun of classic children's books (say, Alice in Wonderland) and most of the accuracy of pictoral-based textbooks.

And finally, the Kindle has a library only as extensive as Amazon can buy out the rights to. Meaning that there are many books you can't get on the Kindle:

What else was missing? Back home, I spent an hour standing in front of some fiction bookcases, checking on titles. There is no Amazon Kindle version of “The Jewel in the Crown.” There’s no Kindle of Jean Stafford, no Vladimir Nabokov, no “Flaubert’s Parrot,” no “Remains of the Day,” no “Perfume,” by Patrick Suskind, no Bharati Mukherjee, no Margaret Drabble, no Graham Greene except a radio script, no David Leavitt, no Bobbie Ann Mason’s “In Country,” no Pynchon, no Tim O’Brien, no “Swimming-Pool Library,” no Barbara Pym, no Saul Bellow, no Frederick Exley, no “World According to Garp,” no “Catch-22,” no “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” no “Portnoy’s Complaint,” no “Henry and Clara,” no Lorrie Moore, no “Edwin Mullhouse,” no “Clockwork Orange.”

And - okay, hold up guys, Baker just totally hollered at my girl Mukherjee (aka my creative writing professor here at Cal :P). Just sayin'.

Anyway, no Nabokov, no Pynchon, no Tim O'Brien, no Heller, no Capote, no Murakami (yes, I just checked), no Burgess??? What is there to read?

It wouldn't be that big of a deal because Amazon will probably slowly manage to acquire most in-print books for the Kindle (just the way it has slowly pushed all local and some chain bookstores out of business). But for a device that is supposed to be "The Last Book," I don't see any real advantage over physical books. So when Murakami's new 1Q84 hits shelves here in North America... you'll find me at the local Barnes.

To read more, continue here: A New Page by Nicholson Baker