I spend a good amount of time each day in front of my laptop, reading. For news and blog posts, the computer’s great, but for long reads it’s a terrible pain. Poor design and backlit screens wear on the eyes, and distractions abound. The result: I’d send many stories to Instapaper, but read few of them. In the evenings I’d reach for the book beside my bed, not my laptop.
Until the Kindle.
A recent birthday gift, the Kindle finally gives me the means to read the web’s bounty of long-form journalism, which I love so dearly, without wanting to gouge out my eyes afterwards. I can sit in bed with this tiny thing and have access to anything I want to read—be it books or Instapaper’ed articles—on a screen that looks awfully similar to a printed page. At last I can read whatever, whenever and wherever I want. That still seems like sorcery to me.
In the last few months, I’ve read more great stories than over any other span I can remember. And with so many Kindles, iOS devices and other reading machines now in the hands of consumers, I know I’m not alone. That bodes well for journalism and publishing, and a more promising future for both I can’t imagine.
Today, Amazon is announcing that it will launch “Kindle Singles”—Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book.
Love it. Great opportunities here, especially for long-form journalism. With digital text, there’s no need to shoehorn stories into legacy categories. That’s no excuse to eschew editing—a tighter story is always a better one, in ink or pixels—but it does allow for richer pieces: what would have been a stretched-thin book condenses into a powerful long read; a magazine narrative, begging for twice the words, develops fully.
I haven’t read The Accidental Billionaires, but Orson Scott Card did:
Mezrich faced a nearly insurmountable difficulty in writing the story of the founding of Facebook. After all his research, he had about fifty pages worth of story, and that’s not long enough for a book.
But it is long enough for a Single.
In short, he loves it, even post-iPad.
With the new models priced so aggressively, I’ll probably pick one up myself.
Nicholson Baker doesn’t much like the Kindle:
Amazon, with its listmania lists and its sometimes inspired recommendations and its innumerable fascinating reviews, is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things.
Instead, he prefers an iPhone or iPod Touch for his e-book reading.
I’ve never used a Kindle, but I have read a book on an iPod Touch. I found the reading experience good but not great, and the small pages forced more page turning than I’d have liked. I’d wait until I had something larger, like Apple’s rumored tablet, before again reading in e-book form anything longer than a short story or novella.