Quote:
Originally Posted by timezone
I thought it was an interesting read because for me it was about technology and how it changes us.
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I think there's a valid point to be made with that. Technology changes us in all kinds of ways -- not all of them obvious. Unfortunately, the author never really tried to make
that point. Instead, she took an incredibly superficial view of reading, and expounded on that for the entire article.
This seems to be the crux of her concern:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Joanne Kaufman
But for the purpose of sizing up a stranger from afar, perhaps the biggest problem with Kindle or its kin is the camouflage factor: when no one can tell what you’re reading, how can you make it clear that you’re poring over the new Lincoln biography as opposed to, say, “He’s Just Not That Into You”?
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That's why I think the article is a waste of bandwidth and ink.
In terms of how the technology will change reading, I think a much more interesting change will be an immense explosion of knowledge. People buying electronic readers naturally gravitate towards the free sources of books, and a lot of these are either literary classics or histories. Exposure to that kind of material can't be a bad thing, and the ability to download direct to your hands could possibly have the kind of effect that the printing press had, for the same reason: You're taking what is normally scarce knowledge that you have to ferret out yourself, and you're distributing it on very large scales. This is something that the Web did already, of course, but with an e-reader, it's that much more accessible to the reader, and it's retainable for later, portable use.