Kindle: Smoldering in the Uncanny Valley?

A loupe is something every bookseller should have in their toolbox. I most frequently use mine to help identify prints in books (etching? engraving? woodcut? mezzotint? aquatint?). They are also useful for making out faded, erased, or otherwise-difficult-to-read writing, differentiating between printed and authentically signed autographs, and the like.

Yesterday, I decided to turn my loupe on the Kindleto see what the type looked like under closer examination. I was rather shocked at what I saw. The letters, even under high magnification, look remarkably like type on a physical page. I expected to see at least some evidence of pixelation, and arguably there is a bit of it around the edges. But what this ends up looking like more than anything else is the slight irregularities one sees at the edges of any type on a page due to the tiny variations on a piece of paper. It’s a little eerie.

And I began to wonder if perhaps some of the resistance among bookaholics to e-readers such as the Kindle was due in part to a kind of biblio-version of The Uncanny Valley:

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.

Is the Kindle – in the words of this classic bit from 30 Rock – just a bit too much “Tom Hanks in Polar Express” and not enough “R2-D2”?

Perhaps. But not enough to deter many buyers. Though previous estimates of Kindle sales have hovered rather ridiculously around thirty- to fifty-thousand (Amazon refuses to release sale info), Tim O’Reilly more convincingly argues for unit sales of closer to one million. And in Britain, buyers are snagging Kindles even before they are on sale overseas.