MattCreamer.com

Newsweek’s looooongggg introduction to Amazon’s forthcoming e-book reader, the Kindle, is dominating the tech blog conversation. The big questions there are over design (it looks like it might be ugly), size (shouldn’t it be the size of an iPhone?) and a subscription cost for to access some blogs (why?). The questions not being addressed, like interface and usability, are the biggest ones, as anyone who’s toyed around with previous e-book readers or even has tried to read longform content on their laptop will know. I’ll withhold judgment until I get my hands on one.

What I’m left wondering is just what the Kindle, however sexy it is, will really do for book reading at a cultural level.  Many of the advantages the Kindle would seem to bring–making large amouns of books portable and immediately attainable–aren’t benefits that are that important to me. I read much more than most, between one and three books at a time, and I buy a fair amount of books through Amazon, thanks to its oh-so-enabling Prime program. Yet I don’t generally need anytime-anywhere access to my whole library. This is in contrast to music, where I love having a selection of 10,000 songs to choose from at any given time. That makes the iPod indispensable to me. It certain ways its changed my life and strengthened an already strong relationship to music. Whether the Kindle can attain that same level of intimate importance in people’s lives  remains to be seen.

Right now, it feels like a longshot. My bet is that if the Kindle, as a product, is half as great as Newsweek says, it will sell and sell big. What I don’t believe is that the future of reading, as the Newsweek cover suggests, is tied up in this success. Reading longform content isn’t about the delivery platform per se; it’s about immersing yourself in a long narrative that, while you might find it distilled and more quickly presented elsewhere, gives you some pleasure in part because of that length. I don’t think people aren’t reading because they don’t want to lug around heavy bundles of binding and paper. They’re not reading because either they’ve forsaken depth for any of the quick-hit alternatives available or they’re getting that depth elsewhere. TV, now, offers any number of strong alternatives to the novel. Shows from “Lost” to “Deadwood” have popped up in recent years with novelistic plot arcs and the psychological complexity in characters you get from reading strong fiction. And non-fiction….Let’s face it, all except for the greatest non-fiction can be reduced to a long magazine article. I can’t blame people for tuning a lot of that out.

My bet is that in one or two years’ time we won’t be talking about the Kindle in the same way we discuss the iPod. I’d also bet that we still see people curling up with paperbacks and hardcovers, only fewer and fewer of them.