Sammy and Beckett’s Book Blog

The digitizing project will save nearly 60,000 deteriorating and out of print books for posterity, while increasing public access to historical material.

In an essay in the Evergreen Review, Kaufman identifies the marketing of the ebook as part of a larger development, one that “indicates not only a rapid demise of the book as a cultural artifact and marketplace commodity but a concerted effort to promote its devaluation, even degradation, even by the chieftains of book publishing.” Wondering why one,  “cannot simply advise E- Book to go fuck itself and produce high-quality reasonably priced books, even if in smaller numbers.”

The Kindle is a technological marvel that has the potential to greatly enhance our relationship with written content — its amazing battery life and lack of eye strain could make digital reading a much deeper  and intellectually satisfying experience. For these reasons, an e-reader will soon appear that will be as widely implemented as PCs and iPods.

However, most of the Kindle’s potential remains untapped. The productivity and communication potential for a mobile platform with a reliable wireless connection, long battery life, and no reading fatigue are almost endless. Unfortunately the device is too closed to reach its full potential, closed to both developers and content providers. Amazon could learn something from Apple, who succeeded greatly by allowing customers’ existing music collections to freely live side by side with purchases from iTunes. Apple has also had a huge amount of success openning up to developers with its app store, where third party content (both free and payed) is available to users. Such a business model has proved so successful that it is now being copied by almost every company that offers a competing mobile platform — every company besides Amazon.