Why the Kindle can’t replace books
The world’s best-selling eBook reader – the Amazon Kindle – has received an upgrade, which has the mind-bendingly original name Kindle 2.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love technology, and I drool at the thought of being able to carry 1,500 books with me in a third of the space of a MacBook Air – with 2 weeks worth of battery life… It’s pretty amazing stuff. Sure, the Kindle has a fantastic 241,164 books available, including the amazing Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which, if you haven’t read it, would be a fantastic first download to your digital eReader. There’s even thousands and thousands of free books available for download on your Kindle!
So, the technology is hella excitig. But it just doesn’t add up: The device itself costs a hefty $359.00 (which is about 250 quid), and while the books are sometimes cheaper, that’s not always the case – the aforementioned Girl with a Dragon Tattoo costs $9.29 in paperback and $11.99 for the Kindle, and the current Kindle eBook bestseller The Shack by William P. Young costs $8.24 both in paperback and on the Kindle edition in the US Amazon store.
Now, perhaps the maths work out if you only ever buy books from Amazon – because, of course, you have to pay for shipping in addition to the paperback price. Even if we calculate £3 shipping, you are still looking at buying more than 80 books (about £800 worth) before you’ve recouped the cost of the Kindle. Do you read 80 books per year? Me, I reckon I take an average of 2 weeks per book, which puts me at about 3 years with the Kindle before it has paid for itself.
Which brings up the final flaw with this otherwise lovely device: nobody I know buys new books, reads them, and then puts them on a shelf. I borrow books. I buy them second hand. I get them as gifts from friends, or I get them sent to me from all over the world via Bookmooch. Then, when I’m finished with the book, I’ll set it free via Bookcrossing, I’ll put it back on Bookmooch, or I’ll give it to a friend to read. Once you have a book on your kindle, that’s where it stays; you can’t give it away easily, and the circulation of books stops with you.
Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer to keep books moving – from page to page, from person to person, and from emotion to emotion (see what I did there? ‘emotion’ as in ‘moving’? Never mind, I’ll get me coat), so I’ll keep on killing trees for a little while longer…
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Yes, it might take some trees to print out things on paper but one has to remember that that paper don’t need any batteries to work.
Even then, electric paper might be quite good thing if they would have gone via similar route as iTunes has recently by making content cheaper. That might actually increase the amount of sold content in more than many could think of.
Even then, that don’t remove aforementioned problem of sharing what you have got to others. Real copy of paper is always real copy (unless it gets damaged in transfer). Still, some might miss search features of electronic books while it might be more relevant feature for manuals than for books about other topics.