thoughts on kindle
Amazon’s new e-book device from two people who I tend to read quite a bit. Mark Pilgrim and John Gruber.
For some reason I like this quote from 1984 very much
Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
and from DaringFireball
So the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.
Very interesting. Reminds me of this:
Fahrenheit 451, the book and the movie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451
Book and movie differ somewhat; I recommend both.
After so many failed, overly proprietary systems, company after company tries to stuff this crap down our throats. The problem for this product lies in that no one really need it, and other more open systems exist. Do you here that sound, kind of like a belly about to hit water?
“That’s no way to build a library.”
Damned right. Enough, already. I’m e-fatigued! I miss my answering machine. I have carpal tunnel syndrome from typing. I long for the days when everything you bought wasn’t obsolete before you could get your credit card back in your wallet. (Credit cards! Wallets! How quaint.)
I took my old CRT monitor into a recycle depot yesterday. I tried to stay focussed on the fact that it’s harmful materials would stay out of our environment. I tried not to pay much attention to the fact that it would probably get shipped to Bangladesh or some similarly desperate place, where its harmful materials would be released into their environment, instead.
Kindle? No. Enough, already.