The Kindle Swindle: When did books go digital?
Jennifer Blake wonders if she missed something with her nose in a book.
Excuse me, but when did electronic book readers become so popular? Amazon claims to sell 48 digital editions of books for every 100 paper and ink copies. With the Internet abuzz with reports that the “popular” US ‘Kindle’ bookreader will be available internationally for the grand old price of $313, I’m struggling to remember ever seeing one in Australia. We’ve all heard discussions of the dying book and how one day we’ll be reading Emily Bronte in 0s and 1s on a handheld computer, but I didn’t realise this day had arrived?
My morning train isn’t exactly filled with commuters poring over digital books… there’s still the usual quota of paperback John Grishams and Dan Browns in my carriage. And I still leave my university library juggling weighty tomes when it comes time for research. It’d be swell to nip in with an electronic bookreader and nab some digital Foucault, but I’m not sure this is common practice just yet. I do remember one guy a few years ago whipping out a digital document reader… I just thought he was schlepping around with one half of a broken laptop. Poor guy.
Before the pedants strike, I am aware digital book readers haven’t been available in Australia until now. But were the entrepreneurial smugglers just lazy when it came to books? Because iPhones supposedly only available for use in America were on the Australian market within days of their release, hacked and ready for use. Maybe IT nerds don’t read books, and hacking the digital bookreader just wasn’t a priority.
And its not like I’ve seen images pouring out of the New York Subway capturing hundreds of Yuppie New Yorker’s whiling away travel time with Twilight in 48-bit colour.
I particularly like that the image the Amazon CEO has used to promote his “baby” is of a digital book reader displaying a copy of a Jane Austen novel. Like the collision of worlds wasn’t obvious enough, Jeff Bezos is literally slapping readers over the head: “Look at me! I’m POSTMODERN! High and low culture collide! 19th century romance meets the hard edged 21st century! And all in the palm of my hand!”
These things look pretty clever. They can download a digital version of a novel in seconds, using mobile phone networks. They even have inbuilt dictionaries, although I feel this is a sad loss for teachers and parents everywhere. I know mine used to get a buzz out of the many polysyllabic words I liked to use as a precocious 10-yr-old, out of context and often mispronounced. My reading aloud debut in year 7 history involved a “subtle” with a hard B and much embarrassment.
But I digress. I am aware of the irony of blogging about this – complaining about a new digital medium in this digital medium. However it is less complaint and more confusion: where are all these digital books?
