A New Page: Can the Kindle really improve on the book?
There’s a great article by Nicholson Baker in the August 3rd issue of The New Yorker about his experience trying to like the Kindle entitled A New Page: Can the Kindle really improve on the book? It’s a well thought out, interesting read. One of the things that made it especially interesting to me is that it is coming from a writer. This guy is a recognized, well-respected producer of the content that we consume on the Kindle, not just some flack with an opinion. Also, as with most articles in The New Yorker, it’s an mélange of great writing, great research, and fascinating tidbits.
A few of the things I found the most interesting or quotable:
"The success of the ebook is being fueled by the romance and erotic romance market," Peter Smith, of ITworld, reports.
The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.
E-Ink was originally though up on a beach by an MIT scientist named Joseph Jacobson. He wanted to call it RadioPaper.
Give the article a read, maybe on your Kindle, maybe on paper, but give it a read one way or the other.
Side note: Have you noticed that many book titles these days seem to take the form Here’s My Point: And Here’s What My Point Really Is. Are we all out of original book titles without colons? My business partner, Pete Sterpe said to me, "I don’t know. But if I did, I’d entitle my explanation: The Two-Part Title: Why We’re Addicted to It." That is evidence of the one of the reasons I work with him!