New York Mag's cover story on the end of book publishing paints Amazon as the big bad wolf ready to blow all the publishing houses down.
I packed my Amazon review Kindle for my recent trip to cover the Toronto Film Fest, along with all my other gear: Flip camera, tape recorder, BlackBerry, Nikon Coolpix, iPod, MacBook. At the fest, I was a one-man band, showing up to cover Kevin Smith or Kathryn Bigelow or the Che press conference, shuffling my various media. I'd take a still photo for the blog, record the interview on the Flip (and sometimes the tape recorder), or take notes the old-fashioned way, in my reporter's notebook. For Che, I Flipped with my left hand and took notes with my right, as I would be handing the camera off to someone else to load onto the site. (I left the MacBook in the hotel with the wifi connection; while some people cart their portables with them, I once left my laptop under a cafe table in Cannes. The maitre d' held it for me.)
The Kindle works like a dream for downloading and reading books, whether at home or on the road. I had hoped it would be the perfect answer to my ongoing war against piles of unread mags and papers, but I found it strange to pay even tiny sums for clunky black-and-white Kindle versions of media, when you can move around more freely in a full-color online universe. Clearly, this is a situation where we should all wait for the new and improved Kindles --or Sony Readers, or Plastic Logic--coming down the pike. Some people swear by the eee PC, a simple small-scale portable computer.
Here's my Kindle column. Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch thinks Amazon should let the device go out into the world to proliferate and prosper as Amazon hangs on to all the book downloads.
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