I doubt print is dead, as there will most likely be nerdy people like me who love reading printed books for a long time. Last night I spent a bunch of time reading astro stuff on my compy, and my eyes were just so very tired. However, this is cool. I heard about it on On the Media, who devoted an entire show to the state of print media. Everybody's touting the Kindle as "Book 2.0", and "the evolution of the book," etc. While I am thoroughly impressed, and agree that it will fundamentally change the way many people read, I doubt that it will kill off books and magazines in print form right away.
True, we may eventually move away from paper as the main source for distributing information, and convert most of what we have to digital form. It's already starting, in fact. But I doubt that they will stop printing paper books within my lifetime, anyways, so what the hell do I care?
Seriously, though, this is the future. I'll continue to buy books at bookstores, because I love the experience of reading them and going to old book stores, and like to be surrounded by them where I live. But man, do I ever want something as slick as the Kindle, too. Why can't we have both?
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I had a discussion with a friend about this device the other night. I have no temptation to buy one, and I wonder what niche it fills, or what problem it solves. The only real thing I could think of where I would like it is if I could fill it will all kinds of reference materials --- there there are all kinds of things of that sort I'd like to carry around, and having them in a compact form would be nice. And the Wikipedia integration would be nice (but not $400 worth of nice). Otherwise, I'm not seeing it.
I do believe that print media, at least mainstream print media, will change radically at some point. Maybe this is the device, but it has a lot of standard electronic book problems to get over, and it isn't the first to try.
according to jean luc-picard, books exist in the 24th century.
And I will not cross Jean-Luc Picard.
Andy Ihnatko from the Chicago Sun Times did a great review of the Kindle: http://www.suntimes.com/business/672259,CST-FIN-Andy29.article
Blogger is probably going to butcher that link.
Anyways, it's much more powerful than advertised. But I'm not tossing away paperbacks or beautiful mags like Make or the Believer any time soon.
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