Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Hardware hacker Igor Skochinsky has cracked open his Kindle — the Amazon eReader that debuted in November — and, as Cnet and other places are reporting, Skochinsky has found a wealth of great features inside. Specifically, he’s found “a basic photo viewer, a minesweeper game, and most interesting, location technology that uses the Kindle’s CDMA networking to pinpoint its position. There also are some basic location-based services that call up a Google Maps view to show where you are and nearby gas stations and restaurants.”

This is all really great stuff, and hopefully the Kindle 2.0 will push these features to the forefront (and maybe even feature yet more stuff). Because this is precisely the kind of functionality that eBook devices need to have in order to be taken seriously. Otherwise, people just look at gadgets like the Kindle and Sony’s eReader and think, “Why spend $400 to read a book, when I can spend $12.95 on a paperback instead?” And so, with the current limitations in terms of features, people can quite rightly claim that there’s not much you can’t do with an eBook you can do with a print book.

Maybe all of this is Apple’s fault. Perhaps eBook makers were too taken with the iPod, and the notion that all it did was play music. Because of this, they thought that all eBook devices had to do was, well, read books. And yet the iPod worked because it did what it did gloriously and beautifully. And — as bibliophiles are constantly pointing out — books are already a near perfect reading experience. Which means that eBooks need to offer a whole lot more than just electronically turning the page, and eBook devices themselves need to offer a whole bunch more than just books. It seems that a lot of this is already lurking inside of the Kindle’s circuit and wires. But Amazon better not wait too long to unveil these features, or else Apple’s going to come along and do it for them.