I was reflecting on the Amazon Kindle earlier. I kept thinking that it was ridiculous and overpriced but now that I found out what it actually does aside from being a glorified text viewer I just think it’s ridiculous. I would also say in general that something isnt overpriced if people are willing to buy enough of it for it to be constantly sold out. Isn’t that what they call market demand? Well whatever.

The main focus of my reflections was whether or not the likes of the Kindle was the future of books. I really want to say no because I have a lot of issues with things that are proprietary (is there some other term for this concept of things being proprietary? propriation? propriatariness? propriating?) but considering the fact that the iPod and video game consoles are still going strong I guess I’m the only one. Although it would be more ideal for there to be freer distribution and consumption methods the reality is that even if you have an inferior standard it is so much simpler to have one because there’s not a lot you can do with chaos.

So the future for digital books is the same as that for digital music: inferior devices dedicated to one given service or the other that are liable to go defunct due to the nature of the free market. My god I wish I had a back-lit calculator. Actually I don’t know how the hell these readers work, if you can plonk any given types of textual media in them and get them to work or not. But I can see greater obstacles to file conversion than what you face with audio/visual files where it’s more a matter of quality than it would be of actual usability/formatting. In that case some kind of media standardization would be more convenient than hardware and service standardization (which would be a monopoly) but there isn’t an incentive to present distributors for that even though there is for content producers and possibly consumers. Yeah I really shouldn’t write about things I know nothing about but it’s kind of fun to speculate and be way off base don’t you think?

Something I am curious about is the comparative environmental impact and resource usage of the likes of kindle compared with a book. One is inclined to think that it would be less waste but aside from clearly using less space and physical resources I’m tempted to think that the nature of the waste from production and the energy usage for the service and the device make things a lot closer. Comparative monetary cost for the consumer is also a curious matter considering that digitalization basically destroys the potential for contemporary secondary distribution (used books) which will ultimately drive up the average cost for media. One also wonders about the future role and value of libraries but that’s beyond the scope of today’s crappy post.

One last thing I need to say is that for the love of god they need to start either backlighting or using OLEDs (at that rate they need to make better OLED technology) or the likes on all screens for all handheld devices. If we all had screens that we could actually see without shining light all over them then maybe we wouldn’t need as much environmental lighting?