 "Photo: Courtesy of Amazon.com")
Imagine someday walking through a library, seeing people reading books, magazines, newspapers and even giant textbooks all through a small, rectangular sheet of plastic. Amazon’s e-text reader, the Kindle, has the potential to do just that. Amazon has already released three different Kindles within two years, with each new and improved version coming closer to replacing and superseding traditional print literature. But even with all its features, can a Kindle truly substitute good ol’ paper and ink?
The Kindle DX, the newest Kindle released in June 2009, certainly tries to outdo its print counterparts. It has a large screen spanning 9.7 inches diagonally, but is lightweight and thin, weighing only 18.9 ounces and measuring 1/3 inch thick. It can read text aloud with its text-to-speech feature, rotates so that text and pictures can be viewed in portrait or landscape, has a built-in dictionary, and can hold up to 3,500 books, publications, and personal documents. Also, it can play MP3 music files, has a simple web browser and can connect to an iPhone or iPod Touch. Best of all, the Kindle DX can download any of the over 300,000 books available in the Kindle library in about a minute using 3G wireless.
For all its flashy elements, there are some things that the Kindle DX could improve upon.
Despite offering numerous newspapers and magazines and bestselling books, users are limited to the Kindle library in their choice of literature. Most college textbooks and reference books are currently unavailable, so Kindles will not be lightening backpack loads any time soon. Even though Kindle books are usually available cheaper than paper-printed copies, there is no way to resell those books to others from Kindle to Kindle. The Kindle DX does not offer users free e-text versions of the print literature they already own, so users would have to buy them again. Finally, the approximate 3.3 gigabytes of storage cannot be expanded, so users may have difficulty storing all their texts, music files and personal documents.
Are Kindles really the books of the future? Not quite. Given the current limitations of content, price and storage, it would not make sense for users to download every book they want to read onto their Kindles. Libraries and bookstores will still be useful places for getting copies of huge research books, obscure, out-of-print texts and quick one-time reads. But having portable collections of our favorite books, newspapers and magazines that only weigh about a pound, help protect the environment and never get dirty does not sound like a bad future at all.
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