Unsolicited Tech Advice

I hate the Amazon Kindle.

I bought the second generation Kindle - the "Kindle 2." I hated it. I'm sending it back.

Maybe I'm not getting the point. I have an iPod touch, which does everything a kindle does and more. That cost me $300. The Kindle, refurbished, cost me $220. The Kindle is an e-book reader. The iPod is, even though they don't advertise it as such, a full on computer. It does email, web browsing, it plays movies, music, and some really cool games. I can even read comic books on it - which works better than you'd think... The iPod, however, is an LCD computer screen - whereas the Kindle has "e-ink."

You know what e-ink is? It's like electronic paper - using tiny micro-sized balls that raise up out of a solution to form letters. It seems like a REALLY complicated way to do what paper has been doing for, I dunno, a really, really long time. The Kindle is supposed to more closely approximate the look and feel of reading on paper.

And I love gadgets. Even pointless ones that do cool things that, despite how cool they are, nobody is ever REALLY going to do. Everything about the experience on the Kindle is - to me - substandard. The reading experience is a bland gray-on-gray with a sickly tint of green. It doesn't even have the charm of a faded used book, that has that nostalgic "old paper" smell. It honestly feels a little like staring at a graphing calculator. Or like when you type out "55378008 and turn it upside down so it says "Boobless." Imagine reading a whole book that way.

Also - it's not ergonomic. Everyone went off about how much MORE ergonomic it was than the first generation of Kindle. The Kindle 1 must have been made of broken glass and crawling with scorpions - because I don't like holding the Kindle. And the "turn page" button was too low. Maybe I have freak hands. That could be it.

Also - the Kindle doesn't have any light. Because "e-ink" isn't an LCD screen - it has no light of its own. Again - more like paper! So you need to "BYOL." You can clamp a book light to it - Amazon sells a "Kindle Book Light" for $20. I have never had a good experience with book lights - but $20 to be able to read in the dark with a $220 gadget... fuck you.

Sure... I could use any old lamp. Or I could just read outside, in the sun. You know what I could also do? Read a book. Made of paper. That I bought at a used book store for $2. That I can then give away to a friend or a library or sell back to a used book store for a small amount of credit. You know what you can do with the books you get on Amazon's Kindle Store? You can read them. You and only you. And that's it. Haha! Fucker!

I'm not opposed to this whole idea. In fact - I've already read two books on the Kindle App on my iPod. I read "Her Majesty's Dragon," a great fantasy novel that puts dragons in the Napoleonic Wars, and the Unabridged Revised edition of The Stand. That's right, I read the fucking STAND on an iPod. So I know about reading on a screen. I also read three books on my Treo back in the day - including Stephen King's Cell, Master and Commander and a Robert Parker novel. On MY PHONE.

But the thing is - I have these devices with me all the time because they DO OTHER THINGS. My phone, being the phone it is, can make phone calls. My iPod does everything else. If I wanted to pay $600 to get out of my contract, I'd have an iPhone - and that'd be that. Point being - I can read these books wherever I am because they're in my pocket. I can also read at night, because I don't need a light that bothers my wife - who sleeps so light you'd think she's keeping watch over a camp during the the zombie apocalypse.

If something cool happens in something I'm reading she goes "What's that?!" "Nothing honey - that was just some of my synapses firing..."

And try carrying around a Kindle. I've NEVER seen anyone with a Kindle anywhere. And I spend a LOT of time in the kinds of places you'd expect to see someone with one. Coffee shops, libraries, restaurants, mall food courts, waiting rooms. Maybe there just aren't that many. Maybe I bought the only one and this is all some kind of Truman Show-esque gadget-freak Punking.

Nevermind the fact that a Kindle - despite having excellent battery life - still HAS BATTERY LIFE. I feel one of the signs of the decline of civilization as we knew it comes not in the advent of murderous robots or killer viruses - but in the following two statements: "Shit, my book's battery died" and "Shit, my book crashed."

I understand I'm having a prolbem most people will not have with the Kindle. I'm torn between loving THE IDEA of the device, and hating the existence of it. The idea that an article in the New York Times weighs the same as The Stand seems inherently wrong. It seems like we're sucking the essential there-ness out of everything. Does everything we do as artists and as a culture have to end up as pixels on an LCD or microscopic e-ink balls suspended in fluid? Every branch of the arts can now be defined in how much bandwidth it takes to steal it. "Oh, you're a musician? Haha! Fucking Megabyter!"

Ultimately, I think this is about a desire for experience. There's the vicarious experience of reading - that's one. But there's the experience that you associate with acquiring the delivery method for that experience. You can fire up your Kindle and download "Pride and Prejudice" for free - and start reading in "Under a Minute!" as the Amazon store breathlessly promises. That's not really an experience - it's a convenience that robs you of experience.

But, thankfully, there are far more books that are not offered by the Kindle store. Like Robert Aspirin's Another Fine Myth. That's one of my favorite series from when I was a kid - and I wanted to check it out again. It's "sort of" still in print, but hard to find, even at the big box stores. That meant I had to go used. Which meant a drive into the Dark Heart of Van Nuys. There's a hole-in-the-wall store called - creatively "Bargain Books." The sign looks like it was thrown up quickly the day it opened, after several weeks of sign-writer's block. The owner probably wanted to call it something like "Milton's Myriad Manuscripts" - but didn't have the confidence for such a thing. And besides, it gets the point across. It's why I went.

The store is two crammed rows of poorly organized stacks. The way it should be. In 30 seconds of staring at the "Science Fiction and Fantasy" section, I saw more book titles, from more authors, and more eras - then I could have seen in an hour of browsing the Amazon store.

And while I'm grabbing at yellow-paged volumes and looking them over - the owner is having a discussion with a friend. I think he's a friend, but he might just be a frequent customer. Either way, he's also a book collector and the two were arguing over the best way to repair a certain book. And then this exchange happened:

Owner: "How about that game last night."
Book Collector: (with complete disdain) "I don't watch sports!"
Owner: (backtracking) "No it's funny... I mean... me either. I don't either. I just think it's funny for one guy who doesn't watch sports - like me - to say to another guy who doesn't like sports - like you - "How about that game last night?"
Book Collector: (suddenly angry) "You know? The rich don't have more money than us."
Owner: (clearly confused): "Yeah... right?"
Book Collector: "Cause it's all just damn decimal points man. In the banks. Whose to say they have more money than me? It's just numbers. It's just decimal points in a computer in a bank that says some rich guy has more money than me. So whose to say?"
Owner: "Well... the bank?"
Book Collector: (eyeing the book repair job) "Hey man - that's the wrong fucking glue I said!"
Owner: "But it says right here - will not discolor."
Book Collector: "That's what it says. yeah. But that's not what it DOES."
Owner: (accepting this reality with all the gravity it entails) "Oh. Oh shit."
Book Collector: "Just damn decimal points."
Owner: "Yeah, man. Yeah."

I mean - that's hard to beat.

And? I found my copy of the Robert Aspirin book for 50 cents.