Klein has an interesting article up on Amazon’s Kindle.
Short version:
Devices like the Kindle promise to do that for us. They pledge to archive our personal intellectual histories, make them sortable, searchable, accessible, and, most importantly, permanent. They will not replace paper. More than likely, nothing will. But they will allow paper to focus on what it is best at -- delivering an enjoyable experience -- and relieve it from it what it is worst at -- transmitting large amounts of information to imperfect receivers.
I already did this to a degree when a typed my lecture notes for grad school. That made them searchable which was often useful in school although hasn’t come up all that much since I got out. Also particularly useful was the ability to have all the electronic class readings at my fingertips, if I needed to pull something up during a discussion I could easily.
In more recent years, my blog reader has taken a similar roll. Starred and shared items, as well as searchable history for all entries, have substantially augmented my memory. I use del.ico.us as my clip file for any newspaper items of interest which then feeds into Google reader via my del.ico.us RSS feed. If I could integrate my books in as well, I’d be closer to having an eBrain of sorts.
However, I really don’t think the software is quite there yet. Aside from Kindle’s proprietary problem we haven’t yet truly advanced that far beyond the magic of search. I think we need to hit the next generation of tagging and citation to truly progress. Essentially citations need to become synonymous with hypertext if not simpler. Copy text from any published document and have it automatically create a citation to the source. Read through books and articles and be instantly able to jump to the documents they’re referencing even if they’re in another book entirely. Be able to clip on ellipses or [cut words] and be able to see what got replaced.
And yet, so little of that matters for pleasure reading. I think Ezra’s right, the eBook won’t kill the book, it will just result in media specialization.
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