Evan Schnittman, vice president of business development at Oxford University Press, has an interesting, positive take on Amazon’s Kindle that is worth a read.
One thing to keep in mind argues Schnittman is that us book-focused news types are not the target audience for this product. This one is for the pure readers. Not the book collectors, the booksellers, not for the book as an object gang but “for folks like my sister-in-law Laurie, a voracious reader of print books” as Schnittman says.
He goes on:
“Immersive reading has always been the bane of electronic content. As extractive content such as reference has flourished in digital form with the public writ large, immersive reading digitally has only worked with a very, very small subset of the population…The Kindle is the first device that not only allows for a pleasurable immersive reading experience (Sony and IRex do as well) but also, like the iPod, creates a seamless experience in getting DRM’d content into the device in less than 10 seconds.”
With all the gloom and doom surrounding reading these days you can’t argue against anything that encourages an “immersive reading experience” but as long as the chains of DRM are still attached the Kindle will not be the ultimate reading machine.
Schnittman’s piece appears on David Rothman’s blog TeleRead