{"id":272756,"date":"2009-07-27T20:14:10","date_gmt":"2009-07-27T20:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/07\/27\/nicolson-baker-on-the-kindle\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:19:44","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:19:44","slug":"nicolson-baker-on-the-kindle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/07\/27\/nicolson-baker-on-the-kindle\/","title":{"rendered":"Nicolson Baker on the Kindle"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new issue of The New Yorker<\/em><\/a> has a really interesting piece by print-advocate Nicholson Baker about the Kindle. It’s worth reading the whole article—I haven’t read a review of the Kindle quite like this one—but here are a few of the highlights:<\/p>\n

\n

It came, via UPS<\/span>, in a big cardboard box. Inside the box were some puffy clear bladders of plastic, a packing slip with \u201c$359\u201d on it, and another cardboard box. This one said, in spare, lowercase type, \u201ckindle.\u201d On the side of the box was a plastic strip inlaid into the cardboard, which you were meant to pull to tear the package cleanly open. On it were the words \u201cOnce upon a time.\u201d I pulled and opened.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Inside was another box, fancier than the first. Black cardboard was printed with a swarm of glossy black letters, and in the middle was, again, the word \u201ckindle.\u201d There was another pull strip on the side, which again said, \u201cOnce upon a time.\u201d I\u2019d entered some nesting Italo Calvino folktale world of packaging. (Calvino\u2019s Italian folktales aren\u2019t yet available at the Kindle Store, by the way.) I pulled again and opened. [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn\u2019t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Baker’s bit about the graphics—both in terms of illustrated books (like cook books) and papers is particularly relevant . . . and funny:<\/p>\n

\n

One more expensive example. The Kindle edition of \u201cSelected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems,\u201d an e-book for people who design nuclear power plants, sells for more than eight thousand dollars. Figure 2 is an elaborate chart of a reaction scheme, with many call-outs and chemical equations. It\u2019s totally illegible. \u201cYou Save: $1,607.80 (20%),\u201d the Kindle page says. \u201cI\u2019m not going to buy this book until the price comes down,\u201d one stern Amazoner wrote. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And the information about Vizplex (“the trade name of the layered substance that makes up the Kindle’s display) is very interesting as well. <\/p>\n

I haven’t tried reading a book on a Kindle or iPhone, but Baker seems to prefer the latter, even though it is a high resolution, backlit reading experience (compared to the “reflective” eInk, which apparently has some issues when you read it outside in the sun):<\/p>\n

\n

In print, \u201cThe Lincoln Lawyer\u201d swept me up. At night, I switched over to the e-book version on the iPod ($7.99 from the Kindle Store), so that I could carry on in the dark. I began swiping the tiny iPod pages faster and faster.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Then, out of a sense of duty, I forced myself to read the book on the physical Kindle 2. It was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Although at that point the text itself takes over: <\/p>\n

\n

But never mind: at that point, I was locked into the plot and it didn\u2019t matter. Poof, the Kindle disappeared, just as Jeff Bezos had promised it would. I began walking up and down the driveway, reading in the sun. Three distant lawnmowers were going. Someone wearing a salmon-colored shirt was spraying a hose across the street. But I was in the courtroom, listening to the murderer testify. I felt the primitive clawing pressure of wanting to know how things turned out. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new issue of The New Yorker has a really interesting piece by print-advocate Nicholson Baker about the Kindle. It’s worth reading the whole article—I haven’t read a review of the Kindle quite like this one—but here are a few of the highlights: It came, via UPS, in a big cardboard box. Inside the box […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,8216,2686,26156,1646],"class_list":["post-272756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-kindle","tag-new-yorker","tag-nicholson-baker","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272756"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":323446,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272756\/revisions\/323446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}