In his essay in last week's New Yorker, the author Nicholson Baker sure goes out of his way to criticize the Kindle. To think, the Kindle doesn't properly render the diagrams from the award-winning medical textbook "Imaging in Oncology." The horror! (Baker has legitimate criticisms as well, such as the screen's color, its occasionally fading clarity and the absence of some literary classics from its catalogue.)
But, as noted in these pages before, Baker's disgruntlement with the Kindle seems valid. I've yet to have the chance to use a Kindle, but the idea of making the act of reading, particularly serious reading, an all-electronic affair strikes me as something that compromises the act of reading. The concentration and devotion reading requires directly contradict the flightiness computer screens engender. It's not terribly surprising that public intellectuals such as Baker dislike (and are threatened by) the Kindle, but that doesn't mean they're wrong.
The often militant commentators of the new-media cognoscenti argue the research, reporting, writing and consuming developed in print can be sustained in a purely online format. There are several examples establishing themselves that proves this, but I'm still waiting for the convincing argument that the online life is inherently better than the paper one.
Update: Baker sure seems to have spent handsomely to prove his point, New York Magazine details here, though he refutes the dollar figures in the comment section.
Further Update: Michael Sokolove has a very well-written elegiac story in last Sunday's Times Magazine about the impending demise of Philadelphia's two daily papers, which are owned by the same bankrupt company. As odd of a business plan it is to have one company own a city's broadsheet and tabloid, Sokolove makes a compelling case for why newspapers need to be saved, somehow, by the market. It's worth reading in full.
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