Steven Levy on the AmaZon KindLe:

• The Kindle's real breakthrough springs from a feature that its predecessors never offered: wireless connectivity, via a system called [Whisper Net]. (It's based on the EvDo broadband service offered by cell-phone carriers, allowing it to work anywhere, not just WiFi hotspots.) As a result, says Bezos, "This isn't a device, it's a service."... "The vision is that you should be able to get any book-not just any book in print, but any book that's ever been in print-on this device in less than a minute," says Bezos.

• Amazon prices Kindle editions of New York Times best sellers and new releases in hardback at $9.99.

• The Kindle is not just for books. Via the Amazon store, you can subscribe to newspapers (the Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Le Monde) and magazines (The Atlantic). When issues go to press, the virtual publications are automatically beamed into your Kindle. (It's much closer to a virtual newsboy tossing the publication on your doorstep than accessing the contents a piece at a time on the Web.) You can also subscribe to selected blogs, which cost either 99 cents or $1.99 a month per blog. (ok, paying for WebLog-s is silly - but that probably covers the EvDo more than anything else)

• In addition, the Kindle can venture out on the Web itself-to look up things in Wiki Pedia, search via Google or follow links from blogs and other Web pages... (ah, so this is really a big MobIle Tablet P C?)

• But if all goes well for Amazon, several years from now we'll see revamped Kindles, equipped with color screens and other features, selling for much less. And physical Book Store-s, like the shuttered Tower Records of today, will be lonelier places, as digital reading thrusts us into an exciting-and jarring-post-Gutenberg era.

• A company called Daily Lit this year began sending out books-new ones licensed from publishers and classics from authors like [Jane Austen]-straight to your e-mail [IN] [BOX], in 1000-work chunks. (I've been reading Boswell's "Life of Johnson" on my IPhone, a device that is expected to be a major outlet for e-books in the coming months.) And recently a columnist for the Chicago Tribune waxed rhapsodically about reading Jane Austen on his Black Berry.

• This decade's major breakthrough has been the introduction of EInk, whose creators came out of the MIT Media Lab... The first major implementation of E Ink was the $299 Sony Reader, launched in 2006 and heavily promoted. Sony won't divulge sales figures, but business director [BobNell] says the Reader has exceeded the company's expectations, and earlier this fall Sony introduced a sleeker second-generation model, the 505. (The Reader has no wireless-you must download on your computer and then move it to the device- and doesn't enable searching within a book.)

• "Books are all the dreams we would most like to have, and like dreams they have the power to change consciousness," wrote [Victor Nell] in a 1988 tome called "Lost in a Book." Nell coined a name for that trancelike state that heavy readers enter when consuming books for pleasure-"LudIc reading" (from the Latin ludo, meaning "I play"). Annie Proulx's claim was that an electronic device would never create that hypnotic state. But technologists are disproving that. [Bill Hill], Micro Soft's point person on [E Reading], has delved deep into the mysteries of this lost zone, in an epic quest to best emulate the conditions on a computer. He attempted to frame a "General Theory of Readability," which would demystify the mysteries of ludic reading and why books could uniquely draw you into a rabbit hole of absorption... Hill insists-not surprisingly, considering his employer-that the ideal reading technology is not necessarily a dedicated e-reading device, but the screens we currently use, optimized for that function. (He's read six volumes of Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" on a Dell Pocket PC.) (MobIle)

  • [Victor Nell]'s [Lost In A Book] ISBN:0300049064 is has some quotes here and bloggage here

  • [Bill Hill]'s [Magic Of Reading] piece from c.2000 is available as a 70p MsWord file (or [Ms Reader])

• Though the Kindle is at heart a reading machine made by a bookseller-and works most impressively when you are buying a book or reading it-it is also something more: a perpetually connected Internet device. A few twitches of the fingers and that zoned-in connection between your mind and an author's machinations can be interrupted-or enhanced-by an avalanche of data. Therein lies the Disrupt Ive nature of the Amazon Kindle. It's the first "Always On" book. (That's clearly not true, any MobIle qualifies. Though without the hi-res screen.)

• "The problem with books isn't print or writing," says Chris Anderson, author of "The Long Tail." "It's that not enough people are reading." (A 2004 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) study reported that only 57 percent of adults read a book-any book-in a year. That was down from 61 percent a decade ago.)

  • the study drives most of its statistics on "literary reading" - the overall-population number comparable to the any-reading stats above are 54% in 1992 and 47% in 2002. If literacy is the baseline for participation in social life, then reading - and reading of literary work in particular - is essential to a sound and healthy understanding of, and participation in, a democratic society. I think that's open to debate. Note also they define literary as NovEl, Short Story, or [PoeTry] - regardless of "quality" (does a porn Short Story count?).

  • numbers for men (in literary reading are 12-18% lower than for women)

  • in age brackets, the 45-54yo group numbers are 57% and 52%, and the 18-24yo group numbers are 53% and 48%

  • there's a more current sequel "[To Read Or Not To Read]" which gets some heavy criticism .

    • Feb'2008: commentary by Steven Johnson.

• "Stuff doesn't need to go Out Of Print," says Bezos. "It could shorten publishing cycles." And it could alter pricing. Readers have long complained that new books cost too much; the $9.99 charge for new releases and best sellers is Amazon's answer. (You can also get classics for a song: I downloaded "Bleak House" for $1.99.)

• Bezos explains that it's only fair to charge less for e-books because you can't give them as gifts, and due to restrictive antipiracy software, you can't lend them out or resell them. (DRM)

• Publishers are resisting the idea of charging less for e-books. "I'm not going along with it," says Penguin's [Peter Shanks] of Amazon's low price for best sellers. (He seemed startled when I told him that the Alan Greenspan book he publishes is for sale at that price, since he offered no special discount.) Amazon is clearly taking a loss on such books.

• The model other media use to keep prices down, of course, is advertising. Though this doesn't seem to be in Kindle's plans, in some dotcom quarters people are brainstorming advertiser-supported books. (Advertis Ing)

• In a connected book, the rabbit hole is no longer a one-way transmission from author to reader... "Book Club-s could meet inside of a book," says [Bob Stein], a pioneer of digital media who now heads the Institute for the Future of the Book (IFBook), a foundation-funded organization based in his Brooklyn, N.Y., town house. Eventually, the idea goes, the community becomes part of the process itself.

• All this becomes even headier when you consider that as the e-book reader is coming of age, there are huge initiatives underway to digitize entire libraries. Amazon, of course, is part of that movement (its Amazon Search Inside the Book project broke ground by providing the first opportunity for people to get search results from a corpus of hundreds of thousands of tomes). But as an unabashed bookseller, its goals are different from those of other players, such as GooGle-whose mission is collecting and organizing all the world's information-and that of the [Open Content Alliance], a consortium that wants the world's books digitized in a totally nonproprietary manner. (The driving force behind the alliance, Brewster Kahle, made his fortune by selling his company to Amazon, but is unhappy with the digital-rights management (DRM) on the Kindle: his choice of an e-book reader would be the dirt-cheap [XO] device designed by the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.) (OLPC)

• [Paul Le Clerc], CEO of the New York Public Library, says that he's involved in something called the [Electronic Enlightenment], a scholarly project (born at the University of Oxford) to compile all the writings of and information about virtually every major figure of the Enlighten Ment. It includes all the annotated writings, correspondence and commentary about 3,800 18th-century writers like Jefferson, Voltaire and Rousseau, completely cross-linked and searchable-as if a small room in a library were compressed to a single living document. "How could you do that before?" he asks. (Hyper Text)

  • lordy, looks interesting but [EE] is available by annual subscription to libraries and institutions. Contact [OUP] for pricing and subscription information!

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