Just as surely as I sit rapt watching Neighbours during my lunchtimes, I’m also wholly absorbed by the developments in the screen reader sector. It’s far from sexy, but, well as Gene Pitney sang, something’s gotten hold of my heart.
I wrote a few months back that books will not die, that we love the smell, the feel and self-aggrandisement that a book can bring you as you sit on the Tube and show off that you’re reading your tales of Harry Potter or Stephen Covey or Angela Davis. You wouldn’t get that sitting on the Tube with your Sony Reader.
Then a couple of days later I took a ride on the Underground and sat next to a woman reading something or other on what must have been a Sony Reader. I had a Damascene conversion of sorts. It hit me instantly. It all made sense: of course screen readers.
Recently I’ve been watching Jeff Bezos laugh maniacally through a number of interviews about Kindle DX, the Amazon reader designed for newspapers and magazines as well as the humble book. He’s been saying things like it’s as revolutionary as the Gutenberg Bible and so on.
A couple things have struck me about this new device. One is that it will deliver you your daily newspaper overnight. You could receive your subscribed for magazines as soon as they’re published, pushed over the air, straight to your device. That’s actually pretty big. It’s wholly different from logging into the Internet on your PC, or rummaging through on your iPhone. Physically, it is a perfect compromise between the ease of paper and the immediacy and interactivity of digital media. Sufficiently lightweight and portable, it is something that can withstand the “sitting on the bog” test I consider vital for electronic reading devices. My Kindle could accompany me to the loo as I even up the score with last night’s dinner and see what’s new in the world.
Second, you can have blog feeds delivered. That exceeds the capabilities of newspapers. I suspect that bloggers secretly want to put out magazines on the newsstand, to see their words on paper next to their favourite publications, and this device enables something pretty close to that. It is Huffington Post next to New York Times. It’s even Mawgablog next to Wired, physically if not quite a match for quality and content on my part. Again, that’s big.
Something’s been niggling me, though. The Kindle needs to be able to handle rich media, and without that, it’s dead in the water, I think, as far as delivering truly next generation published work. Blogs aren’t just about words and pictures. They’re about video and audio, sometimes animation. Kindle without that capability, considering its cost, will struggle. Magazines are gloss and in colour. Kindle is greyscale and static. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were the only game in town, but it’s not, if rumour is to be believed.
Wired, among others, has blogged that Apple has a sort of ‘big iPhone’ all but ready to arrive. It’s speculation at the moment, but there’s reason to believe we might be onto something here. Remember when Steve Jobs used to say, “nobody wants to watch video on an iPod” and “we’re not building a phone!” These days, it’s netbooks that are rubbish.
Also, remember that Apple’s not quite a first mover company, but one that takes what exists and refines it so much that it’s unrecognisable from what came before, and makes it stupendously easy to use and desirable. Take a bit of Kindle, a bit of Tablet PC and a fair whack of netbook, sprinkle it with a bit of iPod Touch and App Store pixie dust and what could emerge would be this mythical device.
Now, the reason I’m mentioning it here is that unlike the Kindle, it would likely be full colour, handle rich media, and enable all the text reading – magazines, books, blogs, newspapers – oh, and textbooks – that Amazon is trying desperately to corner with Kindle. A touchscreen interface, maybe even accelerometers, would make it quite a desirable and interesting to use reading device potentially. And, as an Apple product, it would have a slightly longer honeymoon in which to get the bugs out.
The long and short of it is that for those of us who write for magazines and newspapers, who rely on them to look attractive to advertisers so that we may get paid to put to paper (or LCD screen) our thoughts, these developments look not just like a lifeline, but like Lazarus rising from the dead and moving like Usain Bolt post resurrection.
Yes, rapt is the word.