Still ain't an iTablet

Charles McGrath writes another accolade to the Kindle in The New York Times:

On a recent golf trip to South Carolina I showed off to the rest of the foursome by taking along my brand-new Kindle 2. No one seemed impressed that I had already stored on it practically all of Trollope and six volumes of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, along with the latest Lee Child and Dennis Lehane. But I got a reaction when I pressed a button and the slim, envelope-size device read aloud to us, in a bossy, robotic female voice, from Leadbetter’s Quick Tips: The Very Best Short Lessons to Fix Any Part of Your Game: “As you step up to the ball, breathe through your nose, then exhale and whistle as you start the club back.” For the rest of the weekend my playing partner referred to the Kindle, somewhat warily, as The Future.
It’s not. The reading device of the future will surely be backlighted, unlike the Kindle, so you can read in the dark. It will have different typefaces, and will reproduce photographs and illustrations in something better than a murky gray wash. The read-aloud voice will learn how to pronounce “Barack Obama” and will have mastered a tone more expressive than that of the tiresome know-it-all who talks to you from inside your car’s GPS. In the future airlines will also conclude that you don’t have to turn off a reading device during takeoff and landing. On the way back from South Carolina, I had to dash into an airport bookshop for a backup paperback, which sort of defeats the whole point.
But if the Kindle isn’t the future, exactly, it’s a precursor. What it tells you, even if you are an unreconstructed book lover, is that the future will not be as hard to get used to as you imagined. Books are heavy, the Kindle reminds you, and they take up a lot of room. (I wish I’d had a Kindle last summer, when on a nearly monthlong trip to China I lugged along an entire suitcase full of books just so I wouldn’t run out of something to read.) And though we think of them as permanent, our books are slowly combusting right there on the shelves, the pages growing yellow, the bindings stiffening and becoming brittle.
One of the odder sensations of reading on the Kindle, though, is a sensation of eternal presentness. Your books are all there, perfectly preserved. The device even remembers exactly what page you were on last. On the other hand, as you read along, there are very few cues to how near you are to the beginning, how far from the end. You’re always in the middle.
There is, of course, the problem of eternal sameness. Set in the same typeface, everything on the Kindle looks exactly like everything else, except that some books and publications occasionally turn up with unjustified margins, and for some reason a James Patterson novel I tried to read decided to dispense with apostrophes. Poetry, because the screen is so narrow, sometimes looks bad, and so do plays in verse. And you can’t help missing the pleasing variety and design of books, the dust jackets, the illustrations, the layout of the page.
Then there is the problem of finding your way around. Though you can search for a word or a phrase in a Kindle text, it’s hard to skim or jump ahead. That limitation is particularly frustrating with newspapers and magazines, which arrive without tables of contents and can only be viewed section by section and in the order that articles appear.
Trying to read The New Yorker on the Kindle, for example, is a lot like reading that magazine back in the days when it didn’t have a table of contents and you learned what was in it only while flipping through to look at the cartoons— except that on the Kindle the cartoons are all sequestered together, so small and gray they’re scarcely worth bothering with.
And yet these days, as often as not, I read The New Yorker on my Kindle because, like the papers, it arrives silently overnight via the device’s permanent wireless connection, sooner and more reliably than my print subscription, which sometimes takes a week. Sometimes I remember to look at the print version to see if there’s anything I missed, and sometimes I don’t.
Similarly, though I don’t think that reading the newspaper on a Kindle remotely compares with reading the real thing (or even with reading the paper online, for that matter; there are almost no photographs), on a shameful number of mornings, instead of making the Tony Soprano pajama-walk down to the end of the driveway, I have found myself reaching over to the night table for the seductive white gizmo. It’s like having an invisible butler bring you the paper while you’re still in bed. Papers, I should say. For a while, before the monthly payments started to mount up (they run from about $6 to $15), I was getting half a dozen, including The Times of London and The Independent.
Most of us have become so used to reading on screen by now that we’ve probably become brainwashed a little. Compared with your computer screen the Kindle actually looks a little more like real ink on real paper. Essentially the device presents you with a tradeoff. You endure sensory deprivation— sacrificing the pleasure of spreading the newspaper out on the kitchen table, forgoing the feel, heft and texture of a book, or the crispness and shimmer of a well-designed magazine— for the sake of portability and convenience.
And if you’re at all like me, it’s surprising how easily you succumb to convenience, and how little you miss, once they’re gone, all the niceties of typography and design that you used to value so much. Those things still matter, and I don’t think that books will ever disappear— newspapers and magazines are another matter— but it may be that in the future we will keep them around as fond relics, reminders of what reading used to be like.
Among other things, we’ll probably recall that reading used to be more expensive. At the moment Amazon, which makes the Kindle, is selling new books for the device at a heavy discount— under $10 in most cases. Books in the public domain are an even better bargain. I bought all six of Trollope’s Palliser novels, which would easily cost $50 or $60 in paperback, for just 99 cents. Same for Decline and Fall. Books for the Kindle are so cheap and so accessible, turning up on your device within seconds, that you wind up buying them impulsively and almost indiscriminately.
One evening my wife wanted to check a passage from Dombey and Son, which she had been listening to in the car. Ninety-nine cents, a typed-in phrase and, bingo, there it was. Another time I overheard a colleague praising Philipp Meyer’s first novel, American Rust, and for $9.99 I had snagged it even before she was out of earshot.
The keyboard on the Kindle is designed for fingers more microscopic than mine, and the joystick that controls everything is similarly small and so sensitive that on at least one occasion I have inadvertently purchased the wrong book. I could delete it if I want, but why bother? Shelf space on the Kindle is practically infinite.
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for the Kindle Bookstore. Most current books are available there, but the backlist is strangely spotty. You can buy John Updike’s posthumous book Endpoint, but not any of his Rabbit novels; Philip Roth’s Indignation, but not Sabbath’s Theater.
The poetry selection is particularly skimpy— no Larkin, no Elizabeth Bishop, no Wallace Stevens— but there is an extensive selection of 19th-century erotica by the very prolific Anonymous. One useful feature is a provision that enables you to look at a free sample of a book before deciding whether or not to purchase. This is what convinced me that I needed Leadbetter’s Quick Tips, for example, but also told me that I could probably skip Valerie J. Wood’s 2002 hockey novel Enforcer, about a player named Cal Bowman, a “lean mean skating machine, one of the league’s best fighters, who other teams’ enforcers are eager to taunt, torment, and try to pound into a disabled, bloody mess.”
Over time the selection of books available will doubtless improve, and in the meanwhile for a small fee, you can wirelessly download material from your own computer. Also for 99 cents— the default price apparently— you can subscribe for a month to one of any number of blogs, including Gawker and Fashionista. You will never run out of stuff to read, in other words, and you can take it all with you wherever you go— except possibly the shower. After shelling out $359 for my Kindle I have been reluctant to test the waterproofing.
The screen is small, though not as small as the iPhone’s, on which you can also read books— and if you’re a fast reader, the wait while the tiny black particles realign themselves on the screen after you turn the page is annoying. Yet in many ways the Kindle experience is reading reduced to its essence: deciphering marks on a slate. To say you appreciate written language more when it’s transmitted this way, without the familiar delivery mechanism of paper, print and binding, would be a stretch, but after a while you don’t appreciate it any less.

Rico says he's still gonna wait for the Mac...