The future of reading

Amazon recently released the second generation Kindle ebook reader that offers more storage and a slimmer design. There’s a text-to-speech feature that reads out books, magazines and newspapers to you, and a better screen that now boasts 16 shades of gray.

As a reviewer of tech gadgets over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate the importance of good design and the Kindles still don’t cut it in the design department. I owned a Kindle while I was in the U.S. more than a year ago, and while there’s no doubt it offers lots of convenience – volumes of books in just need one device – it is not sexy like an iPod or PSP.

I’ve since sold my Kindle, because I can’t download ebooks over the air in Singapore (for that, the Kindle uses Sprint’s EVDO network). Yes, I could buy stuff from the Kindle store and transfer those over via USB, but that means I’m missing out a whole lot on what the Kindle stood for – the convenience of getting books and the New York Times delivered over the air.

Tell me why I should still stick to reading printed newspapers that always leave my fingers stained with black newsprint. BTW, I always have to wash my hands after reading the papers, because the next task in my morning routine is to log on to my white Macbook.

For the past week, I’ve been working on a book review and one of the things you do as a book reviewer is to make notes and point out quotes and paragraphs that could make it into the review. I ended up folding dog ears of pages, and sticking Post It notes all over. It was messy, I should say. On the Kindle, I could make annotations, bookmark pages and highlight text. Best of all, I could search for text if I needed to look up content, which really makes index pages look silly and redundant. After all, it’s only ONE way of arranging the topics in a book.

With the Kindle 2, we’re inching closer to what the future of reading might be. The book format may still remain but the medium will change, and for the better.

If every book has a reader, then why are bookstores and libraries not carrying every single book published, even if it’s only sold or loaned out once every five years? It’s the tyranny of physical space – the limitations of space have forced physical bookstores and libraries to restrict their offerings to mostly hits. With ebooks – and when (not if) we perfect the ebook reader – there’s no reason to only stock the hits. For users, it means gaining access to an infinite bookstore or library.