Kindle 2: Books in the Age of Distraction

With the capacity to carry more than a thousand electronic books, the new
e-book reader from Amazon is perhaps the computer geek’s or
environmentalist’s dream gadget. But is it the bookworm’s? |  IslamOnline.net

Clearly Amazon wants to be part of what is potentially the “next big thing” in the realm of text. Having snatched magazine-cover publicity for the first generation of its e-book reader, the Kindle, Amazon has uncovered the second iteration last week, with display and storage capacity  improvements.

The Kindle 2 offers about ten times the storage capacity of the 180 megabytes in the original gadget. It also sports 16 gradations of grey, instead of the Spartan black-and-white in the Kindle 1. This means that the Kindle 2 display (which utilizes the E-Ink technology developed at the MIT Media Lab) is getting even closer to mimicking the experience of reading paper books. E-Ink is a display technology that is different from liquid crystal technology common in laptops. The MIT-developed technology uses less power, is less bright (thus doesn’t strain the eyes as quickly as liquid crystal displays),
and is readable in daylight.

The proposition of the Kindle is straightforward: A thin, light gizmo dedicated to viewing (and
bookmarking and annotating) books.

You can take it everywhere and download books (and newspaper articles and blogs) on the fly, thanks to a 3G-like chip that affords the Kindle a wireless, always-on access to a data network. And the gadget is seamlessly integrated with the largest book retailer on the Web, Amazon.com.

Not surprisingly, many are saying that with the Kindle, Amazon seeks to replicate in the written word what Apple has achieved in music with its iPod-iTunes. And in fact, users seem to have been receptive to this proposition, depleting the Kindle stocks in less than six hours as the e-reader was first  introduced in October 2007.

Ask the Bookworms

As was the case with the first iteration, the Kindle 2 sparked a media circus — with commentators debating the hardware specifications of the gadget; what Amazon needs to consider for the Kindle 3; or how the Kindle 2 compares to other e-readers such as the ones from Sony and Plastic Logic. And, of course, there are  those carping about the Kindle’s “primitive browser“; the fact that one couldn’t increase the Kindle 2’s storage capacity through a micro-SD memory chip, nor remove the battery to easily shut the Kindle 2 down.

Apparently absent in these discussions is the question, does the Kindle 2 (or any e-book reader for that matter) provide what avid book readers want? To begin with, what most book readers would probably say is that what they want most in the reading experience is the least amount of distraction. Here, what all e-book readers appear to be offering, alongside the reading “enhancements”, is plenty of distractions, as Christine Rosen points out in her essay “People of the Screen.” Falling for the temptation to play with the Kindle’s Wikipedia search and blog subscription, among other features, Rosen found out that she ended up reading less of the (e-)book at hand (a Charles Dickens novel) than she would were she reading a paper book.

To be sure, some would counter that the distractibility factor is inherent in the Web itself, not in the devices that connect to it, be they laptops or e-book readers. But then this raises the question of
whether enabling Web access in e-book readers is a useful addition.

And the same question may well apply to most other features. If the Kindle is essentially a book-centered device (at least according to the testimonies of the small army of celebrity authors Amazon lined up with the Kindle rollout), does it make for a better book-reading experience to add a “primitive browser” for a quick e-mail peek, newspaper or blog subscription?

The Wrong Audiences

That is not to say that the Kindle and other e-book readers are entirely ill-conceived devices. The advanced displays and ease of navigation are welcome additions. Still, one can’t escape the impression that in conceptualizing and designing the Kindle, Amazon appears to have solicited opinions from the wrong audiences. First, by choosing to offer a “multi-purpose” device (read books, check e-mail, browse the Web), Amazon has in mind the “convergence” trend in which multitasking is the new gadget norm: music-playing mobile phones; location-aware watches; and Web-enabled TVs.

The problem is that while certain gadgets and activities lend themselves to multitasking (like listening to music on iPod while wearing the treadmill out), others just don’t. And reading books is one of those. In fact, if there is one activity that honorably rejects co-optation into any multitasking scheme, it is
reading books.

Instead of discussing this, the gadget-reviewer class and blogosphere’s self-appointed pundits were
quickly sucked into debates on hardware specifications: whether the 2-gigabyte storage capacity in the new Kindle was better than the replaceable micro-SD; whether the Kindle’s EV-DO data network chip
should be supplanted, or augmented, by a Wi-Fi chip; and why the third-generation Kindle should be touch-operated, like the iPhone. In other words, the “geeks” — buying into the “more is better” (more storage capacity, more features, higher internet speed) — have largely dominated the discussions on e-book readers.

But it wasn’t only the geeks. With rising environmental consciousness, the metaphor of paper books as “dead-tree” books is gaining circulation. Thus a gadget that carries more than a thousand e-books would seem to somehow placate the environmental conscience, while delivering the perceived efficiency resulting from easy access to books and easy navigation.

That view, however, implies a false choice for a text-delivery technology: between the reading-efficient, environmentally-inefficient paper books and the (arguably) environmentally-efficient and reading-inefficient e-book readers. Do we have to choose between these two?

So if it’s the conventional wisdom of gadget manufacturers now that any gadget not Web-enabled is viewed like a quaint artifact from the 1990s, and if the Web is guaranteed to distract, and if distraction and book reading don’t get along well, then one is left with the impression that the recent spate of e-book reader offerings probably did not have book readers in mind.

Or, to be fair to the less skeptical alternative view, Amazon and others may just be responding to the fear that if they don’t start offering e-book readers, others will. In other words, they don’t want the “iPod” of books to happen without them in the game. [Robert Spector's account of the birth and rise of Amazon in the book, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast, supports this view. That is, Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and chief executive, prefers to adopt incomplete ideas rather too early instead of waiting until they are fully formed, which could turn out to be too late.] And in that case too, not much thought is given to how book readers go about carrying on their curious habit.

And even on the easy access and navigation side, new research suggests that making text available in the digital format (which is easier to index and search within) did not necessarily lead to better utilization of existing knowledge. In a Science paper titled “Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship,” published last July, Mark Evans writes that contrary to the intuitive expectation, “even as deeper journal back issues became available, scientists and scholars cited more recent articles; even as more total journals became available online, fewer were cited.”

Extending this finding to books, there is no reason to believe that more book availability at any point (and of course they are not free of charge) would necessarily translate into more or higher quality reading.

This all is not to say that books (or more broadly the written word) are best preserved in the paper format. For text processing activities — as in research, indexing, etc. — paper is clearly a deficient technology. As a text-delivery technology, by contrast, paper does the job. Yes, dead-tree paper won’t afford you Web access, and that is a good thing. Paper instead affords us the solitude necessary for reading. And if that sounds quaint, it is how it should be. After all, reading is an ancient human habit.