The Sensual Massage Blog

The New Yorker review of the Kindle

Thursday, August 6th, 2009 | Uncategorized

I read the New Yorker profile of the Kindle on my Kindle; I’m a subscriber. According to Nicholson Baker the Kindle has a lousy screen, a very limited library and cannot compete with “real” books in any meaningful way. Furthermore, it doesn’t work as promised and costs too much. Ebook wannabes should maybe get an iPod, which he prefers, having read a mystery on one.

Yes, the Kindle can–and will–improve but it’s pretty great as is. I say that after a month’s trip through the UK–including a week on a bike–with my Kindle. I read it under all kinds of conditions and enjoyed every minute.

The iPod/Phone produces a better image, which supports color but it’s not much fun to use for text-only documents. It’s rather like watching TV on a wristwatch. If the iPod/Phone were to grow larger–and it might in a few months–that will be a different story. But for now it’s tiny screen is really too small for serious reading.

My company Arcata Arts has published three of our books on the Kindle so far. Since PDF’s make for clumsy graphics, we added an html conversion. If you have a Kindle or iPod, take a look at THE ART OF SENSUAL MASSAGE, SENSUAL MASSAGE ON A STRING or SENSUAL MASSAGE MADE SIMPLE. They might have the best looking Kindle graphics yet. You won’t find a single case of the blown formatting that Baker obsessed about.

What bothered me most about the New Yorker profile was the notion that the Kindle is some kind of a swindle. I’m hoping that this doesn’t discourage serious publishers from producing ebooks. Publishers and authors should commit to the ebook format now. They shouldn’t be put off by a clever luddite at the New Yorker–who just doesn’t get it. The bottom line is that ebooks bring more reading into your life by simply making it easy to spend more time with books. How can that be a bad thing?

Publishers with photo books might want to consider adding html conversion after scanning the book to PDF. This will work for photos on the Kindle/iPod, which supports 8 shades of grey, but not on the Sony Reader, which supports only 4 shades. It’s considerably more time consuming but that way micro adjustments become possible and you will have no formatting surprises. (Charts and maps may require more work, since the Kindle doesn’t zoom) Generally, art needs it’s own screen. Text comes on the next or previous screen. Using this approach we cleaned up our books and I’m really proud of the results. When color comes to the ebook (it’s available now on the iPod/Touch) our books will display in full color.

“It’s so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve on it,” said Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, to Baker’s great annoyance. Bezos has a point. I can see the ebook transforming higher education. No more struggling to carry piles of expensive books around the campus all day. Professors will come to prefer, even demand, course ebooks, especially in a fast moving field where new research might be incorporated in an update a week or a month later.

For writers the ebook is a revolutionary development. It is a purely intellectual product: nothing need come between the author and his readers; no middlemen, no agents–and if you’re not put off by some computer work– not even a publisher.

Gordon Inkeles

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