I agree with a lot of what you say, Janice, except for the swipe at e-books. I know we are all more than a little fond of holding traditional books in our hands, but I've had a Kindle now for two months and absolutely love it. The experience of reading on a Kindle is much more like reading a "real" book than reading off a computer screen, and just about everyone I know who has given the Kindle a try has agreed that it's a wonderful way to read.
Most of the time, the experience is very similar to reading a paper book, but there are benefits that paper does not offer, including (a) having up to 3,500 books and magazines available in a single 8 ounce reader wherever you go, (b) being able to bookmark and annotate what you read, (c) being able to instantly call up a dictionary definition of any word you read, (d) having instant access to countless thousands of free, public domain books, from the complete works of Shakespeare to Dickens to Wharton, and (e) being able to read the first chapter or two of just about every book, including new books, for free.
I agree with you about the limited utility of reader reviews on Amazon, but I don't see them as a problem so much as a feature that I don't care to make much use of. I'd rather have them than not, frankly. In independent bookstores, I often found books labeled as "staff picks," but I was never much influenced by the index cards in which some store clerk told me why a given book was worth my thirty dollars. Apart from not knowing the taste of the clerk, it was just as likely as it now is on Amazon that the pick was driven by sales factors or the comments were written by a friend.
One problem with the Kindle, by the way, is that poetry tends to be formatted incorrectly. So many Kindle books, including Wilbur's latest, leave out stanza breaks and have other grave errors. They claim that the Kindle format limits their options, but they are wrong. You can also put your own personal documents on Kindle, and I have done that with poetry and gotten it to be formatted correctly, so if I can do it, I can't see why Richard Wilbur's publisher can't do likewise. But for prose, Kindle is fabulous.
|