Kindle 2 – Is this the beginning (at last) of the iBook?

The EBook reader has been around for a while now, and yet it has not set the world alight like its musical cousin the iPod, but with the launch of the Kindle 2 by Amazon at the end of February it is hoped, at long last, that the world will eschew leather bound paper books as we once ditched gramophones.  We wait with baited breath for the revolution in reading.  We have of course been waiting for some time, and it is a subject close to my heart as I am a reading addict who gets through around three books a week on average.  Yet I don’t own a dedicated eReader device (I use a palm top with Microsoft Reader sometimes), and I do own in the region of a thousand books, even after a recent cull of around five hundred during a house move (I had over a hundred cookery books for god’s sake!)  So if a dedicated bibliophile like myself has so far resisted buying in to the technology, is the Kindle going to take a hold of the world in the same way as the iPod?

Perhaps it will, but I personally feel that the above question is not a fair one for a number of reasons. Firstly a book and some music are very different media in the first place.  Music has long been synonymous with equipment, and in our lifetimes certainly that equipment has changed rapidly.  I was born in 1976 and as such I have witnessed firsthand the three ‘revolutions’ in the way in which music has been delivered and listened to.  I started listening to music when Sony introduced us to the Walkman. Cassette tapes had been around for ages, but the idea that music was portable was entirely new, and very very exciting.  A Walkman was the must have item of my youth, and you weren’t cool unless you had one, and I would gladly have sold my grandmother, parents, even the family dog to get one (they were bloody expensive.)  When I did get one for Xmas, it was without a doubt the happiest day of my life.  It was the size of a 100gb hard drive and had headphones which made me look like a Cyberman.  Soon after this the CD revolution came along and Vinyl went out, unless you were a DJ or a Jazz purist, and more recently the MP3 and iPod revolution has made the CD only useful for putting hot cups of coffee on.  But a book has always been a book in the mean time, with pages, a spine, print and cover.  The point I am driving at is that we are all of us used to radical change when it comes to how we listen to music, and each technology offers something new for music.  Walkmans made it possible to listen to music when you moved around, CD’s offered great benefits in keeping music intact (no more scratched records or unspooled tapes) and the MP3 combines both of these benefits and drastically improves size, battery life and storage capacity.  A book has always been portable, and relatively unbreakable if you take some care over it, although admittedly the Encyclopaedia Britannica was a bit difficult to get in your pocket, but it’s a crap read anyway.

The real difference between digital music and digital books is in the old adage ‘Revolution not Evolution’.  Advances in music technology have presented us with revolution at each turn; each new technology has increased our ability to enjoy the media in some way.  The same cannot be said of eReaders. Yes you can carry around a thousand novels, but it is unlikely you will read that many on the train to work.  The eReader is an evolution, and evolution takes time. Conversely revolutions happen with alarming speed.  I believe in the technology, and I may just take the punt on a Kindle 2 in the coming months, but I, like so many others, will not embrace the technology with the same speed with which we rushed out to buy a new MP3 player and download thousands of songs.  Books are more time consuming and luxurious to many of us. The one area which interests me greatly is the ability to subscribe to a number of publications with Amazon and have them delivered to your Kindle, but increasingly I read all the news opinion and comments I need on the internet for free, so will this be a long term pull for the eReader?  Time will ultimately tell the fate of the Kindle. Will it be VHS or Betamax?  When I finally get one I will give it a proper road test and a review, so keep tuned to this site for more news.