I started writing this before I found out that two of my favourite magazines have gone under due to the economic recession. Although magazines are quite different than books, they are part of the same family. Being a book lover myself who dreams of having a luxurious library reminiscent of the times of F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, the thought of less books being printed due to the economic climate, is frankly, terrifying.
Read this for a brief history on the attempted demise of books. Books have been in jeopardy or supposedly doomed since the creation of papyrus. The new rush of ebooks and technologies that let you download books from wherever you may be, will affect books, yes, but they will not completely obliterate books.
I will agree that these new little portable reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader (seen above) make reading anywhere much easier. If you’re an avid reader who always travels (whether overseas or on the bus) with a book in tow, you have at some point experienced medicore lighting. Not everyone carries a reading light (or owns one for that matter) so these new little portable reading screens will come in handy.
However, these little machines don’t seem to make much sense economically. If you read a lot, its likely that you enjoy having a book in your hands and will therefore buy books to add to your collection. Even for people who read sparingly, it’s still much more economical to go out and buy a book or borrow it from the library. Why would you go out and spend $500 on a reading device and pay for downloads if you only read here and there. It seems like this device would be a sound idea for a business individual who’s always on the go and who lives in a metropolitan city, in a tiny downtown apartment with no room for a decent sized bed, let alone a book collection. But then again, do these people even read books? I thought they read the Globe and Mail from their blackberries.
So who is this product for? Techies who get a thrill out of new technological toys and who move onto the next cool toy after a few months?
