All I seem to talk about here, these days, is Kindle. But this article: “Despite hurdles e-books face, E Ink Corp. of Cambridge has come into its own supplying electronic paper“, in today’s Business section of the Globe, is worth reading.

And this little zing from Carolyn Y. Johnson in the article had me snorting DD’s coffee out my nose:

The demo model provided to the Globe stopped working yesterday, not responding no matter how many times the reporter depressed the reset button with a paper clip -a problem never encountered with an actual book.

Whoops. Maybe it was a suspense novel she was reading, imagine the authorial possibilities!

She raises a few good points… and my greatest argument against the Kindle (I’m not wholly averse to e-books, just not crazy about paying to read blogs, the ugly design of the Kindle, and the loss of the tactile nature of reading, which leads me to…) is this line, from Jane Austen’s pretty funny Northhanger Abbey: when you’re getting near the end, and there are loose ends to tie up:

The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment
must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all
who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend,
I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see
in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them,
that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity.

There’s no tell-tale compression of the pages (unless she was talking about gzip) in these ebooks. At the very least I’ll give the Kindle this: it’s gotten everyone talking and thinking about the electronic book.

Just when I get around to making a post (albeit a lame one) about Kindle, Sean Lindsay comes up with an excellent review/response to the Kindle launch.
101 Reasons to Stop Writing : » Where’s the Fire? Amazon’s ‘Kindle’ Fizzles

Pundits have been predicting for years that ebooks and ebook devices will eventually, finally, once and for all free us from the tyranny of having to carry around more than one book when we travel. This neotopian vision of a paperless, rights-managed future took one giant stumble forward last week with the launch of the Amazon Kindle ebook reader.

Really, really well put.

Personally, I love my bookshelves, I love wandering around book shops. The textures, colors, sizes of the covers make a large part of the experience for me, of reading a book. Especially since my reading, these days, consists of me looking longingly over at the bookshelves in the living room whilst shackled down to the couch with a young one occupying both arms. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at the spine of Home Land (which I’ve read) or Spook Country (not yet) or Arthur Koestler’s Sleepwalkers (read, but always good for a re-read) or any number of the other books up there, knowing that if I moved even the slightest bit the kiddo is going to wake up and ruin our remaining waking hours (as well as a few of the intended sleeping ones). I can’t imagine looking at my ebook reader’s lovely plastic side and getting the same effect, as lame and sad as the original effect actually is.
I’ve even tried this, just a few minutes ago, to try my hypothesis. For lack of an ebook reader I used a Tupperware ™ container that was kind of rectangular-ish. And I got nothing. No feelings, whatsoever. See? Ebooks are doomed.

Okay, I don’t want to sound like Sven Birkerts, (God help me, let me never sound like Sven — and by no means consider that link as an endorsement of the book at the end of it), but I agree with Chip Kidd when he dumps this post on us:
A Brief Message: Notify the Next of Kindle:

On Monday November 19th, Amazon released something called Kindle, the latest “e-book” reading device. I’ve been asked to comment on what effect I think this will have, if any, on book design as we know it. Here goes.

None.

I’m not entirely sure I agree with his postscript, in which he claims no one wants to read on a screen… but it’s been the end of books for quite some time now… and they’re still available. So get ’em while you can, I guess, because it’s the end of books. Again.