Georgetown Independent

Issue date: 2/24/09 Section: Arts and Entertainment

Recently, there has been a swarm of buzz about these nascent days of the Kindle 2, Amazon.com's second generation electronic book reader. The Kindle, which is about the size and weight of a large paperback, now has the potential to rise as our next iPod or flounder into being as popular as MIDI Discs. With its breakthrough E-paper that may forever change the way we read blogs and online content, its celebrity endorsements (Toni Morrison, Michael Lewis, et al), and the panoply of publishers and periodicals that have signed on to make their works kindle-accessible (NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, Boing Boing.net) it appears that the kindle may have all the pieces in place for its success to spread like a well-fed bacteria culture. And, because Amazon's new invention can potentially have an impact upon the reading world only matched by that of Gutenberg himself, a constant stir perpetuates itself, questioning whether the $359 price tag is reasonable, whether this whole "E-Paper" thing is actually going to take off, and whether we may actually be the lucky spectators of the world's last days of paper.

The Kindle 2's specs are impressive, especially considering that nothing like this has ever been created en masse before. The screen is 6" diagonally, and it can run for up to two weeks. The notebook has wifi capabilities, so it will conitnually update blog posts and news articles on the fly. Also, Amazon provides access to its online book stores, ensuring that you can purchase any E-book directly to your Kindle from anywhere with an internet connection.

Despite these impressive features, many argue that the Kindle doesn't have the steam or incentives to shift our world into a paperless one. For example, even Apple Inc.'s CEO Steve Jobs argued that to get into the electronic book world is just fiscal suicide. People listen to music. They watch movies. But, "People don't read anymore." According to Jobs, people aren't going to shell out the cost of 400 songs or 80 movies so they can avoid perusing the shelves of Barnes and Noble while potentially coming off as holier-than-though douche bags reading off a $400 tablet in Starbucks.

Others argue that the Kindle's benefits just aren't nearly as considerable as they may initially appear. The initial success of the iPod was in large part due to its original marketing, "iPod is this amazing digital device that fits in your pocket. It carries 1000 songs!" Surely Amazon could market the kindle similarly, ala "Fit 100 books right in your backpack," but this tact leaves us scratching our heads and wondering if there's ever been a time that we even wanted more than two books in a bag, let alone a score of them. Perhaps there are other ways Amazon can make us salivate at the sight of its weirdly spaced keyboard and blah egg-shell body, but it may still be hard to imagine that we are going to be trading in our beloved leather-bound libraries and oak bookshelves for something that lacks the iconography and overwhelming benefits as did the iPod.

Despite all these potential drawbacks of Amazon's new invention which are only a few upon a very long list, surely we must admit that a paperless world seems far less out of reach than the flying cars and turkey dinner pills that we were promised in "Back To The Future II." Sooner or later, it seems that someone will get the price low enough, the benefits high enough, or paper will become costly enough to shift our eyes from hardbacks to hard drives. Even if we must wait for Steve Jobs to finally make a book reader we crave, it seems natural to assume that college kids, at some point, will be begging for extensions on papers because they spilled coffee on their E-paper, ruining their E-ssays.

Whether or not the Kindle is going to take flight just yet, or whether someone else will swoop in on Amazon, we must admit that it seems that at some point down the road paper farms are going to be suffering for buyers.

And because it is likely that paper will be as much a relic as candlesticks or typewriters, a more stirring problem presents itself to the people at Amazon that they seem to be expediting rather than curbing. When all of our books, newspapers and magazines become available electronically, we will just be purchasing patterns of ones and zeroes rather than unique, physical artifacts from booksellers. Once the booksellers and newspapers just sell data, what's stopping us from illegally sharing books, magazines and newspapers with the same unadultered zeal that we download data files of music and movies? Is there any reason to actually believe that an electronic book won't be an inevitable victim of file-sharing networks like Napster or ThePiratesBay just because it's a book? Will this new era of publishing that Amazon so desperately hopes to blaze actually smother the book business rather than uplift it?

While many may initially want to believe that book readers may just be a more ethical cross-section of the populace, it seems far-fetched to believe that a great percentage of Harry Potter readers (twenty-somethings and teenagers) could really be that different from Usher fans (twenty-somethings and teenagers). Moreover, it's ludicrous to think that the differences between the numbers of books stolen online and that of stolen music could be caused by a difference in ethical stances on book piracy versus music piracy. Using Harry Potter as an example alone, it cannot be the case that downloaders could find something wrong with stealing a book from a woman richer than the Queen of England while they find nothing unconscionable with stealing from Usher. Rather, it seems that the current difference between music piracy and literary piracy must be chalked up to the differences between what we miss from experiencing stolen music as compared to what we miss from experiencing a stolen digital book.

If Amazon's aspirations of Kindle ubiquity are realized, the reading world will become accustomed to reading digital publications rather than paper ones. We will continue the literary evolution from tablets to scrolls to books to Kindles like our change from phonographs to mp3s. We will digitize what we read, thereby making our words more easily reproduceable and sharable than ever before. And, when things become easy to share and reproduce, they will be easy to share and reproduce without consent of those who have rights of the words that are tossed around.

If the Kindle takes off, and it changes the way we read, its success will make the differences of experiencing a stolen book and a purchased one indistinguishable. If we stop purchasing physical books, readers who download literature and periodicals will be presented two very obvious options: pay, or don't. And even though Amazon may take a zillion precautions to attempt to ensure that Kindle users won't get their books and magazines elsewhere, it is hard to imagine that an online bookseller will find the way to curb electronic piracy while the record labels have spent a decade grappling for a way to stop downloaders like a skydiver for his emergency chute.

Amazon's new electronic reader could very well be the most destructive invention that has ever faced the online giant. If Amazon.com is able to proliferate Kindles, they will just be proliferating a medium to that puts stolen books on the same playing field as purchased ones. Unless the people at Amazon plan on making a seismic shift in their market towards the electronics industry while ruining the publication business for everyone else, they seem to be playing with fire. In their quest to burn books to sell their ashy white tablet, they might just get burned.



Oranburg is Arts and Entertainment Editor and a Philosophy junior

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