Kindle the Flames of Progress

There is an elephant just over the horizon, waiting to rush up and shake up the world.  It is the Kindle, a new eReader for eBooks from Amazon.com.  In its debut, it elevated hopes and sent prognosticators in a tizzy with its unique capabilities and unheard of before abilities.  You see, the Kindle has a wireless, super cell-phone system hardwired inside and allows you to buy and download a book, in less than a minute, from almost anywhere in the world.  While the Kindle’s stats are impressive, they seem to be simply new uses for current technology, used in a way that not quite changes anything about paper books, reading, or everything aligned with the two.

The creation of the internet was a cusp event that truly changed the world.  Even though at conception it began with a whimper – only later exploding – it was still something completely new on this old rock we all live on.  It changed completely how we do almost everything in our lives, and still does.  Each year something else is added to the internet that changes or replaces another part of our analog world.  The Kindle eReader is nothing like the internet.

The Kindle does replace a bookshelf or two of paper books.  It does replace trips to the bookstore or library.  It lightens the backpack load of any student or researcher.  Despite all of its strengths, however, it doesn’t come near to replacing a book.  Set aside the collector mentality – the need for possession of your reading materials, how they look lined up on a shelf, etc. – there isn’t yet a replacement for curling up with a book on a couch, or studying one in a coffee shop.  Well, there is and there isn’t.  Yes, the Kindle is lightweight and thin, so a good cuddle on a rainy afternoon is possible; and yes, the Kindle works in coffee shops, but it’s not a replacement for a book.

Cutting down to the marrow, the Kindle just doesn’t do what it does as well as it could.  Take email for example.  It wasn’t just another, faster way to send a letter, it transformed and vastly improved sending information, pictures, etc.  It wasn’t just quicker; it completely improved upon what we had before.  Speaking of letters, look at how word processing and spreadsheets turned its ink-and-paper counterparts on their ears.  Microsoft Word or Excel didn’t just do the same thing but a little better, it was vastly better than anything that had come before them.

For example, using the Kindle’s capabilities more fully, readers should be allowed to add content of their own.  They should be able to take notes in the margins, highlight passages, make multiple bookmarks, and create their own index in the back.  Not only is this already what can be done with a book, but the Kindle would be able to make great strides beyond.  Think about all of your notes and highlights.  What if the Kindle kept track of them for you?  No more searching for the small, but vital sentence you found an hour ago.  You would simply go to the “My Notes” tab.  Now that’s improvement.

The internet, or really Web 2.0, is all about social networking, cross-linked information, and user-submitted content.  The Kindle could be a perfect fit with the current social, cultural, and technological setups.  Take the notes tab from above and insert it into our current way of doing things.  Well, you would not only want others to be able to see your thoughts, but you would also want to read what other people thought of a particular part of the book you’re reading.

The Kindle should be able to embrace and enhance this kind of interactivity easily.  Perhaps a toggle that allows you to switch on margin notes where you can see the top rated scribbles of fifty people – spread around the world – that put their thoughts into the Kindle network.  Or more simply, there could just be a star in the margin that, when clicked, takes you to a Google page filled with millions of people’s thoughts about that one sentence.  Talk about group collaboration.  It could be a meeting of minds that hasn’t really been seen on the internet before except possibly Wikipedia.com.

The Kindle has great potential.  It’s like an MP3 player before large storage mini hard drives or iTunes; yeah, you can take more music with you, but why bother when you have over 200 CDs?  If the Kindle can maximize its technological capabilities, only then will it have the chance to become a widely and commonly used book replacement.

On that day, we’ll look down at our Kindles and say, “How in the world did people read without this?”  (And there will be 20,000 answers to this sentence in the margin)