This week, and for the first time ever, I laid my hands on some of that amazon kindling stuff. Well, it was rubbish for lighting fires; couldn’t get it to give me a spark no matter how many of its lovely little buttons I pressed. I even tried to use the screen to reflect the sun and set light to a dried leaf, but nothing! PAH! Then I read the instructions…
So, the Amazon Kindle… I’m torn, you see. On the one hand, the lover-of-books in me wanted to stamp on it, then run around finding every other ebook readery thingamajig, and do the same to them. Perhaps even start a slur campaign against them. But the other side of me, the it’s-about-the-story/nice-gadget/that’s-exciting side couldn’t help but get excited about it.
I downloaded a sample of one of my own books just to get a feel for it. And it was great! I was suddenly whisked away to a world of StarTrek where this kind of tech would make way more sense than a fat library of well-worn paperbacks. The screen was crisp, the device itself a really rather fab little thing that made me smile, the buttons very buttonable…
So, conclusion? Well, I can’t say that this will kill off the book and every other form of printed word, but I can say that the ebook is here to stay. It’s a scary thing, but it’s also exciting. Same as skydiving really. When I did that, I was terrified, didn’t want to jump, but when I did, it was just amazing! OK, so there are more sensible ways to leave a plane (such as waiting for it to land first) but the experience was brilliant. Ebooks are a new experience, a new way of doing something, and the potential to do what we do now, but in a different way, is just huge. Time to give those old ebooks a big hug I think.
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