Digital listening versus digital reading
While looking at a book on my desk a colleague said “I thought you would be using Amazon’s new Kindle”. I said it wasn’t for me, and I can’t see myself ever reading a book digitally. We talked a bit about the experience and how it’s different from music online and I came up with an analogy that I think fits.
With music it’s difficult to experience a concert digitally; it’s an experience, and a long experience at that. Listening to songs works, but I can’t see digital concerts replacing the real thing. With reading I think it’s the same. Articles are the singles of literature, reading online works, short bursts good experience. Books are like a concert, longer sustained experience where digital isn’t as good as the real thing.
I know I’ve blogged about digital reading before and I’ve strongly felt the Kindle wouldn’t really take off, despite strong sales data, I’m happy that I’ve found myself an analogy that makes me feel better about my instincts on the medium.
For me, the issue here is that Kindle isn’t solving a problem.
The reason the iPhone has worked so phenomenally well, for example, is because it does this very thing - improving a traditionally terrible UI, creating device convergence without sacrifice etc. People needed it - I’m not convinced people need Kindle…
March 26th, 2008 at 3:28 pmI think in principle it does solve a problem. I have no idea how many books I have at how home or a simple way to go back and read through my copy of things I read a couple of weeks let alone years ago. Kindle would make this easier in principle, but in practice doesn’t because the experience is different.
March 26th, 2008 at 4:00 pmDid you try it before knocking it?
March 30th, 2008 at 1:47 amHaven’t tried it, have you FT?
Don’t have an incentive to try it, I like reading books in paper, and I like taking books from the LBS library. No incentive to switch to digital really. Except for storage and searching and for books and me thats not a huge incentive.
March 30th, 2008 at 12:25 pmHaven’t tried it either, but I read so much I figure I will try it. It’s like saying VHS is good enough so I won’t try DVDs… you gotta try it
March 31st, 2008 at 10:41 pm