The New York Times is reporting that Amazon.com is coming out with a bigger Kindle for textbooks and newspapers (pictured right). Try as I may, I just can’t get that excited right now about the Kindle, large or small. Here’s why:
- Cost: The latest Kindle is $359. For someone like me, who read about one book every month and a half, that’s the price for almost three years worth of books, just for the device to read them on. For me to consider getting a Kindle, the price has got to come down, a lot.
- I love the tactile feel of books. I love flipping through pages. I do a ton of digital reading every day, but when it comes to literature, I still prefer the paper version.
- Digital fatigue: I’m surrounded by gadgets and digital devices on a daily basis. The 30-60 minutes I spend each day reading on the bus or at lunch is an escape from that, and I don’t want to lose that.
- I’m out of power outlets. Seriously, with all my computers and other electronics, last thing I need is one more thing to have to recharge every night.
- Until I can’t read newspaper stories online, I’m not going to read it on a Kindle. Furthermore, the idea that a BIGGER Kindle could help newspapers seems rather silly to me. Converting to digital form doesn’t do you much good if you still have to lug around a large delivery system. The current Kindle’s screen may be small for reading a newsPAPER, but not a news story. I can see the large Kindle screen being useful for textbooks as it would be a reduction in size and bulk, but it seems a step backward for news, which is already being delivered to much smaller mobile devices.
What I can see myself using a Kindle for is taking a bunch of books with me when I’m on a trip somewhere. But then again, if I’m on a trip, chances are I would spend less time reading and more time enjoying whatever destination I’m at. I’ve thought about getting a Kindle for my wife, who’s an avid reader and total literature geek. Yet she doesn’t want one. She likes books, in part because she loves to underline and make other notations while she reads. Maybe when the Kindle includes a Stylus pen for doing just that, she might convert.
Of course, we would rush out and buy a Kindle today if it looked like this:
