My ten-year-old daughter and I are reading parallel copies of Twilight. Hers is the flesh-and-blood paperback, while mine is the pasty gray zombie version, downloaded to my Kindle. Our two “books” have a similar footprint, but the paperback is a lot fatter and weighs a few ounces more.
When I got bored with the unquenchable adolescent longings of Edward the Vampire on a recent Amtrak journey, I downloaded an obscure collection of short stories by design critic David Barringer. Then, hungry for a quick literary comparison, I grabbed David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion. (In between, I clicked through the NYTimes.)
I travel a lot, and usually alone; the Kindle is great for “reading out” in restaurants. (No book to prop open; no pages to turn.) It’s equally comfy to read my Kindle in bed.
The screen design is attractive, featuring the slab serif typeface Caelicia. But every book looks the same, as Priya Ganapati points out in a recent post on Wired.com. The Kindle’s current generation upholds the universal design principle of separating form from content, allowing text to flow onto any device and be adjusted by the end user. I do miss the “voice” of typographic difference, and I really miss the awesome graphics from the NYTimes, but the Kindle’s readability is more than satisfactory. And, as a forty-something, I dare say I like big type.
As someone with an enormous collection of books, I welcome the chance to dematerialize some of my reading. I don’t really need to own paper copies of everything I read. The Kindle is an awesome reading apparatus, but I suspect that I will always lust for the living pulse of ink on paper.
— Ellen Lupton · 2009-05-27
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