Un-book

The evening of Monday, July 28th, Clark Quinn and I will be facilitating a discussion on the future of the book at the NextNow Collaboratory in Berkeley. I love books; my shelves are perpetually overflowing no matter how many cartons I give away or recycle. Nonetheless, the form of the book as we’ve known it is under severe pressure, and it’s not just the people who don’t believe in sending the world’s forests to paper mills.

As part of my prep for the discussion and to satisfy my lust for cool gadgets, I bought a Kindle ebook from Amazon. I popped it out of its book-like box fifteen minutes ago. I’m sold. Devices like this will co-exist with books, not replace them, but they will be significant.Very significant.

What do I like about the Kindle thus far? The screen resolution is great. Better still, there’s a button to bump up (or down) the size of the text. The Kindle feels good in the hand; it  comes with a cover that could fool others into thinking that you’re reading a real book instead of a screen. Navigation is intuitive.

I plugged the unit in. One of the initial items on screen was a message from Jeff Bezos. So far, ho hum. I clicked open the message. “Dear Jay,” if began. I took Jeff’s instructions and visited the store. Kindle recommended half a dozen books, the same personalized recommendations I would have gotten online, but still: custom recommendations, collaboratively filtered just for me. Personalization! Great!

Charlene Li’s book on web 2.0, Groundswell, was one of the recommendations. I could download Groundswell to my Kindle for $7.99 (the dead-tree version is $19.97). Click! The download was wireless and painless. The sale automatically dinged my Amazon One-Click credit card. This thing is a dangerous drug for a book junkie like me.

Tomorrow, Uta and I fly away for a week in Seward, Alaska. I intend to give the Kindle a thorough test and will provide a full report at the Future of the Book talk. (Email me if you would like to attend; admission is $20.)