by Iskra

Created on: September 10, 2010   Last Updated: September 12, 2010

The Kindle and other on-line readers certainly look impressive and promise to revolutionise the realm of reading in the not too distant future.  The concept behind on-line readers like the Kindle are surprisingly not a new one.  Irish classics writer, Jonathon Swift's Utopian novel Gulliver's Travels, tells of Gulliver travelling to a strange land where books are narrated to the reader!  In contemporary times Pod-casts and other high-tech means of narrating books, though promising to change our concept of reading, have yet to seriously challenge the paperback.

There is the potential that the online reader could make purchasing the latest bestsellers and the likes of textbooks cheaper, as well as the other advantages suggested by the manufacturers.  As most people already know, academic textbooks are virtually a license to print money, once they are accepted onto a curriculum, the publishers can charge virtually what they like, plus the academics who write them and endorse them get paid handsomely also!  On-line readers could potentially do real damage to the print media and could very well revolutionise our concept of what a newspaper really is.  On the negative side, this could see redundancies in the print industry on the scale of when type-setting was phased out.  Newsagents are already viewing the likes of on-line readers like the Kindle with suspicion and a feeling of impending doom.  It is a fair guess that hitherto repressed Luddite tendencies are being awakened within Newsagents at on-line readers potential for inducing pauperism within their ranks!

In practical terms on-line readers like the Kindle can suffer the same high-tech problems that other computer products regularly face, such as signal breaks, crashes, viruses and a whole range of other bugs that still plague our on-line browsing and hardware.  As anyone who spends more than an hour in front of a computer screen will confirm, reading even large spaced blocks of text over even a medium length of time can become visually difficult, tiring and even lead to well documented headaches. 

It is doubtful that the likes of the Kindle will ever replace traditional paperback books.  On-line readers are still within the realm of gadgetry and ultimately they will remain a decidedly niche market.  Paperback books will always have a value with the reading public, even one that is ragged and dog-eared can contain a treasure house of entertainment.  The on-line reader will never be capable of replacing the whole mystique connected with paperback books.  A treasured book collection or personal library to the avid reader is much more than a collection of printed words, they have become part of our homes and even an integral part of our identity kit.  One can tell a lot about a person by even a casual browse at their paperback book collection but on-line readers, in comparison, are simply featureless electronic devices, devoid of human connection.  Traditional paperback books remain the best reading delivery system available and their distinctly low-tech, user-friendly format will never suffer from electronic glitches, battery failure and they will never, ever, crash!

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