"I Don’t Want To Consume Media That I Can’t Interact With
That’s the bottom line. When I come into contact with media, I want to do something with it. Tag it, post it, reply to it, comment on it, favorite it, share it, gift it, quote it, whatever…
When are people going to understand that digital media, be it a book, a song, a film, an article, or whatever else, is not passive media. That was analog’s gig."
Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson reacting to the Amazon Kindle
When I was 6 the school playground was full of clusters of kids crowding round the lucky few who had been given digital watches with games on them. I asked my parents for such a watch for my birthday, but they didn’t quite ‘get it’ and I received a decidedly analogue Timex. My mother says she realized her mistake when I unwrapped the watch and with a cry of anguish, demanded "But what does it do?".
All of which is a roundabout way of saying the Amazon Kindle, which was launched with a great deal of media hoopla last week does lots of things, and doesn’t do others, and perhaps we should be asking ourselves what we want books to do and be as we hurtle towards a near-future where all media and all content consists of ones and zeros.
I haven’t seen or played with a Kindle yet, but there is plenty of online coverage to be found here, here and elsewhere and it has certainly brought ebooks into the mainstream like nothing before. Undoubtedly the
Kindle, and particularly it’s wireless delivery system, is a revolutionary way of putting books in the hands of readers. But, I wonder, is that enough?
It’s quite instructive to read some of the comments in the Fred Wilson post above, and also comments on uberblogger Robert Scoble’s anti-Kindle rant – clearly there is much debate over whether books have to be social objects. This debate occasionally surfaces here at Penguin Towers where the book lovers among us (and there are one or two) argue the point that to immerse oneself in a book is to isolate oneself from interactivity – books should not necessarily be a shared experience, they say, and there is interaction between reader and text.
Almost lost in the noise about the Kindle was the release of a lengthy report from the National Endowment for the Arts entitled To Read or Not to Read. The conclusions are sobering for anyone in the book business. Basically, Americans are reading less and this is especially true of teens and young adults ‘who are reading less often and for shorter amounts of time than other age groups and Americans of previous years’. Now I am not about to claim that this is solely because of Youtube, Xbox and Myspace and other forms of interactive digital media. But perhaps we publishers and book lovers do need to think about whether books need a social life and work out how to satisfy those who want simply to disappear into a story and those who won’t consume media that they can’t interact with.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
PS I know what I want out of an ebook reader – a vast library, accessible anytime from anywhere, a decent screen and the ability to share my discoveries with others and see what my friends are also discovering. Internet access would be pretty necessary, and one of those neat touch screens like the iPhone has. I pretty much want it all, and I actually think we’re nearly there (maybe not for this Christmas though). But what do you want from an ebook reader? And, in fact, do you want an ebook reader at all? Leave your comments below…
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