There was curious news on the Web recently. A blog called Engadget was credited with uncovering plans by Amazon to release an e-book reader to compete with the Sony Reader, and the scoop was carried by a handful of blogs. It would appear that a major distributor of content is getting into the hardware game with a device called “Kindle.”
Although the blog at the Institute for the Future of the Book cited the scoop, Ben Vershbow, a researcher at the institute, expressed some skepticism about whether it was real. After all, the reader looks like it was manufactured in 1985. And why would Amazon get into this business?
Regardless of when Kindle was made, Mr. Vershbow says, this kind of reader is old technology. These sorts of e-book readers “are not all that different from the devices being used in the 1990s that never caught on but were being hyped,” he says. Granted, the technology is getting better and people are reading onscreen more and more. But discussions about the improvements in e-book hardware are a “red herring,” he says. E-books of this sort combine “the worst of print and the worst of digital.”
“I really don’t see this as a big future direction for publishing,” he says.
Instead, folks at the institute are talking about “networked books,” and so are others. The networked book was the subject of a recent Chronicle cover story and, to the surprise of Mr. Vershbow, a recent article in The Wall Street Journal. “We were shocked by the fact that they were talking about networked books,” he says. —Scott Carlson
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