Real books likely to rule a bit longer

Oct 22 2009 By Lewis Harrison, The Journal

AMAZON, the online seller of books, music, hi-fis, fridges, televisions, blenders, one-legged mountain goats named Clive and practically everything else under the sun, will soon start selling its own e-book reader, Kindle, in the UK.

Weighing less than the average Harry Potter hardback and looking rather like an iPod for giants, the Kindle lets you download, store and read electronic versions of books and newspapers.

So should IKEA be quaking in their flatpacked boots at the prospect of Billy bookcase sales plummeting overnight – or will the Kindle fizzle out before it gets going?

The technorati have been banging on about this product for ages now, saying that it could revolutionise the book publishing industry, and perhaps even save the world’s ailing newspapers.

One of the biggest selling points of this plasticky white box is that it’s terrifically convenient. You can download a wide selection of books from hundreds of top publishers which are then stored in its memory, ready for you to open and read whenever you like.

There’s also the money you’ll save on the price of books, with electronic versions of books costing less than their printed counterparts. And then there’s the coolness factor. As with the iPod, iPhone and various other gizmos that always seem to have an ‘i’ in their name, the Kindle will be a serious object of desire for geeks everywhere.

While technophiles will surely snap up the Kindle in their thousands, I can’t imagine many other book- worms doing the same, at least not at the expense of reading printed books.

One problem is that reading reams of lengthy paragraphs is hard to do on a screen because it makes your eyes hurt. It’s one of the reasons articles on the web tend to be short.

Then there’s the price. Sure, the price of individual books might be cheaper than printed versions, but at £200 for a Kindle, you’d have to get through Barbara Cartland’s entire back catalogue before you really started saving much cash.

The biggest problem, I think, is that – more so than films or music – people like their books to come in a tactile medium. There’s something fantastic about losing yourself in a good book, leaving the hassles and reminders of the real world behind. If the very thing you’re using to read the book – a hi-tech gizmo – reminds you of that world, you lose some of that escapism.

The Kindle is a wonderful, convenient gizmo. But until its price falls I can’t see it truly catching fire.

Lewis Harrison is communications manager at Codeworks, the North East’s centre for digital innovation.