More Kindle

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/03/until_quite_recently_id_seen.php

I think he tries to carefully step around the whole "kindle vs book" dichotomy, and I applaud him for that.

I feel the same way about the Kindle as I do about digital reproductions of paintings. They are an adequate facsimile, but the viewer should never confuse the two, and unfortunately many won't ever know what they are missing.

I have spent some time looking at Robert Rauschenberg's paintings. He is known for his layers, combining offset and transfer printed media, found objects affixed to the painting (raising the surface). He overpaints on top of things, creating a kind of damaged opaqueness that I find compelling.

What I have discovered is in looking at digital reproductions, I am missing a lot of that detail. This should come as no surprise. The issue here is that I don't know that I am missing that information, that in photographing it a lot of that information is lost.

In transferring books to a Kindle, we transfer the content, and textual representation. In many cases, it comes down to viewer preference (Kindle vs iPhone vs. Computer Vs. Real Book). All do an adequate job of displaying text.

But I think about books that rely on the characteristics of paper. Edward Tufte's books could be put on a Kindle, but I think it would be a damaged experience. A lot would be lost -- perhaps not the drawings, tables and graphs, but the physical layout that Tufte spent so much time perfecting would potentially vanish. Someone looking at it on a Kindle may never know the difference between the two -- and as a result key information (his layout reflects his central ideas of information organization) would be lost.

I have to be careful here and not sound like a luddite. I think the Kindle is kind of cool. It is just that many of the books I want to read wouldn't really work on the Kindle -- a few would to be sure, but my experimental typography book surely would not.

Of course this will all change soon enough. Display technology will continue to improve. The challenge for designers will be to appropriate from books what makes sense, but embrace what the medium/platform has to offer, forever changing the reading experience.

Will books go away? I think mainstream books will eventually. There will be enclaves that will continue to publish books because of their love of printed matter or because their designs will not transfer successfully to books. It may be akin to the market for high quality reproduction audio versus 256 kb/s MP3's. The mp3's are close enough that most won't know the difference, but they won't ever understand the nuance that may be lost -- or not even care -- given the advantages of lossy compressed audio.

Sorry to keep this so long but this is a central topic with me, what happens to media when it migrates. What is gained, what is lost, how does the physical representation of the media cause it's meaning to change (yeah yeah macluhan). It is important to consider. But it is also inevitable. Fighting it is ridiculous, for it is going to happen. Better to look at what it can do for us than to spend time criticizing it's failures.

So the Kindle will likely spawn more things. I am concerned about the Kindle for a different reason. Their business model pushes back against consumers. Buyers end up with less than they had before, and the content is tethered to a device for viewing. Not even the iPod does that. It is a precedent that I find worrisome.

--hal