Electronic Book Readers: What About Now?

by Andrea Millar — April 5, 2008

When I was a kid, we had a Texas Instruments Speak and Spell with some truly awesome features. It talked to you! It had a handle for easy portability! It was mustard yellow and orange and blue! Years later, paper flashcards are still around, while the Speak and Spells are resting under a few layers of disposable diapers. I wonder, even with the success of the Amazon Kindle, what the fate of portable electronic texts will be. It's a noble effort, to be sure, and has the potential to greatly reduce paper consumption; think about all those books you read once and throw on the shelf until you have to move. It was really great to have that copy of Harry Potter at midnight the day it came out, but now I'm fairly sure I'll never open it again. Newspaper, though recyclable, is already heading the way of my Speak and Spell. Although a further refinement of pro-internet technology, e-text products like the Amazon Kindle or the similar Sony E-Reader may be the last bastion for single-source information like newspapers and magazines.

With this in mind, there has been ample room for a specialized electronic text reader to break into the market for sometime. Although a wealth of books exist online, it can be a real trial to attempt to get through a novel on a laptop. You can't exactly curl up with your copy of 'War and Peace' if you're hindered by a keyboard, not to mention eyestrain from staring at a monitor for too long. While cell phones, PDAs, and music players have merged rather seamlessly, books seem to remain successful in their original format--just check out how small the books-on-CD section is at your local bookstore. So, a specialized book reader that recaptures the book experience, though a strange bunkmate to your all-in-one gadget, may be just the thing.

Will it succeed anytime soon? It will...provided the people behind the Kindle and E-Reader can recreate that other essential aspect of books: the bragging aesthetic. No tweed-bearing intellectual wants to sit at a coffee shop, Kindle in hand, only to be seen staring at a little taupe box for two hours. What's the point of curling up with Leo Tolstoy and a cup of black coffee if no one can tell that's what I'm doing?