To Kindle or Not to Kindle, that is the question

Kindle, Sony E-reader, digital formats for reading novels. Is it really the way ahead, and will it superceed conventional books? Phoenix Ark hope not, don’t think so, and since Guttenberg, a book has been a thing of beauty, and bookshops wonderful places to be. Yet it’s inevitable that books will transfer, and are doing so rapidly. Perhaps to publishers, but authors too, it is all about price pointing, delaying Kindle and others sales until a book has acheived in the conventional market place. The thing about Kindle, controlled it seems by Amazon, like Sony’s E-reader, is that they are platforms and since folk started going on about the medium being the message, the smart money knows that controling the point of sale is the key. So Kindle becomes a virtual bookshop, where everyone has to turn if the readers are going there. Perhaps in fifty years time we’ll live in sparce, modernist homes, with one ‘machine’ representing a library as vast as the internet. Then perhaps those clever, terrifying technocrats should invent a book that has flipping electronic pages, and a cover that takes on the entire style and design of a novel, almost magically. The one place where that could triumph is in Children’s Books, adding film to the word. But still all those publishers have to believe, as the best Hollywood directors believe, in the importance and power of the storyteller.