Cohen’s Kindle Jeremiad

I know that it’s become axiomatic that the Washington Post editorial page has seen better days. But I was still kind of floored by Richard Cohen’s editorial today on the Kindle, Amazon’s new ebook reader. It’s basically a polemic about Amazon. I was unaware that the Washington Post had so much page space that they were willing to publish an editorial bemoaning the fact that Richard Cohen doesn’t like reading the suggestions page on Amazon. Thank goodness there’s not something important to talk about right now!

Few people love a good bookstore more than me. I’m reminded of it everyday – living abroad, English books are a hard commodity to come by, and a good secondhand bookstore is unthinkable. I would love to be able to wander through the aisles of a bookstore right now. But you know what I love more than a bookstore? Books.

Cohen writes,

Feeling oddly guilty, I bought a Kindle myself. Someday soon, I'm going to see how it works. I hesitate because I know it represents the beginning of the end -- books as books, bookstores, book lovers and, inescapably, the brilliant Frederic Manning, resurrected by a bookseller only to be eventually reinterred as too obscure to be Kindled.

This just seems incredible to me. Clearly Cohen hasn’t used the Kindle (neither have I, for that matter) or really thought through the possibilities of it. One of the biggest things that interests me about the Kindle is the idea that no book would ever have to go out of print again. Organizations like Project Gutenberg exist to try and save works of literature that have fallen out of copyright from disappearing. In fact, here’s a link to a treasury of poetry by WWI service members, including Frederic Manning, published in 1917. As anyone who has tried to read a literature-length piece of writing on a computer monitor knows, it is an (at best) unpleasant experience. The Kindle uses a new technology that gets past that barrier: it feels like reading paper, because the screen doesn’t use an LCD. What the Kindle offers is the ability for unheralded, underappricated works to exist in a cheap, easy and finally readable format. Perhaps only a few people know who Frederic Manning is (I certainly didn’t until I read the editorial), but using technology like the Kindle, people will no longer be beholden to the vagaries of the publishing industry to find a copy of it.