I bought a nook.
I can’t tell you specifically why I did this, except that I enjoy reading and gadgets and this helps me with both. It’s actually a pretty nifty little piece of technology. And in some weird way it feels more like “The Future” than the thing I should have bought. I’ll try to explain.
When I was a kid, they tried to tell us all how eventually paper books would be replaced by digital paper. I remember seeing pictures of these “e-books” with their hopelessly arcane user interfaces and clumsy, picture frame aesthetics. When the Kindle came out, it felt right. If felt like “The Future”. The iPad, on the other hand, feels like the future. Notice the subtle difference? The iPad really does feel magical. Using one is totally effortless, and makes you feel like the first Neanderthal to wield a rock axe; when I first picked one up I was struck by the sense of being in the midst of a whirling vertex of evolution. Perhaps this is a bit hyperbolic.
The nook and Kindle, on the other hand, don’t feel that way. They feel, instead, like using a marketer’s version of the future. The nook and Kindle are a way for two massive companies to leverage warehouse upon warehouse of content that increasingly no one wants to consume in its current format. These devices allow those companies to pour old wine into new bottles. Are they still fun to use? Of course. The nook has some incredibly well conceived features. It enables you to buy any one of millions of books instantly, to mark them up, even lend them out. It’s light, the battery lasts for what seems an eternity, and it’s dirt cheap.
The iPad isn’t a lever or a new bottle, nor was it designed by any committee looking to repurpose a warehouse full of books. It isn’t cheap, and it has a huge bright (glass) screen that challenges its battery life. Still, it seems so far-fetched and so futuristic that I can’t even imagine it being mentioned in Stentorian tones on a news reel in 1951. The nook and Kindle have that feel. They are single-use devices—digital books, with trimmings—and as such they feel exactly like the sort of sci-fi widget you’d see at a World’s Fair next to the car of the future. And in a way, I kind of like it.
