To great pomp and circumstance Amazon last week unveiled Kindle, its e-book which promises to take technology and “do things the book could never do”. Cue a glut of prophecies of the death of the traditional book.
Ok, so with the Kindle you can search by keyword, store an entire library on one device and, and read two separate documents at the same time. Sure, it may have a battery life of over a day and be able to accept e-mails, all these things a book cannot do.
But the reason why a book cannot do all that is, well, because it is a book and books aren’t supposed or ever required to do these things. It would be useful if all books were fitted with bottle openers in case you were in the park reading and stuck without one. Why not make a book that can double up as a hat?
Have you ever bemoaned the fact that you cannot search through your copy of War and Peace for every reference to Nicholas Rostov? If this was necessary every novel would have an index. We simply do not need books to anything more than they already do.
The e-book is not a new concept (although it is not yet old enough to do away with the hyphen). From their roots in the mid 90s, e-book readers have had an unspectacular history. The first major launch of an e-book reader was that of Bookeen’s Cybook which was launched in 2004. Heard of it? Neither had I. The Hanlin e-reader…anyone?
It is a common fallacy that technological developments will replace all of its incumbents. The bicycle, for example, was not made obsolete by the advent of the motorcycle; nor was the radio by television.
There is no demand for an e-book and no tangible benefit of an e-book reader over a book. Amazon’s Kindle is a glorified PDA, needlessly adapted to accept an ‘e-book’, and it is doomed to failure. What I want is an e-book reader on which I can accept phone calls, send e-mails, surf the internet, and listen to music, so, sorry Amazon, I’m getting an iphone instead.