Kindlebild 1.0

Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” is not an inventory of books—instead it is an inventory of activities involving the buying and selling, handling and arranging, valuing and remembering of books as physical objects. A scholar or serious reader is now likely, even without a Kindle, to buy the majority of her books online, and to have no tactile interaction with books during the process of buying them. The Kindle completes the process of the consolidation of the sale and distribution of books. New and used, Amazon dominates by ease of use. The efficiencies of scale at Amazon must be monumental; the Kindle increases those efficiencies, now that publishers will in effect deal with a Wal-Mart of bookselling, which will control the book trade at the wholesale as well as the retail level. Transmission costs will be reduced to a nearly insignificant amount. Paper and the fuel to deliver books will be saved. Amazon currently packs books clumsily and wastes immense amounts of cardboard in shipping. The labor hours of bookstore workers will be saved, as will the labor of postal delivery.

Perhaps in terms of efficiency there is no argument against books as kindling. To resist the electronic book is probably a futile form of nostalgia. Even so, the Kindle, like most cutting-edge technologies, is merely a temporary incarnation of a larger set of ongoing operations. There will be competition. Perhaps Apple or Microsoft or Sony will come up with a better electronic reader. The Kindle is an expensive technology, primarily because its content is proprietary. As in the case of the iPod, this probably won’t be an obstacle to its success. The most important question will be the ownership of content. Kindle users pay Amazon directly even for books which are out of copyright. Why pay to read a newspaper when one can read it for free on any laptop? When will someone hack the Kindle, and enable it to access free content? Or does wireless transmission preclude this possibility? Wireless networks, after all, are pay-as-you-go. With rare exceptions (bootlegged wi-fi and pirated music), there are no free rides in the technology world. Cell phones are cheap; cell plans are not. The Kindle, like the Blackberry, is effectively an installment plan technology. By its own logic of efficiency, the Kindle is likely to put itself out of business.

As for the physical codex, it will doubtless always survive, but perhaps in smaller numbers. The increasing prevalence of electronic reproduction (from JSTOR to Googlebooks) will likely raise the cost of the physical codex. The codex was arguably the single greatest tool in the spread of literacy and social change over the past six centuries. Even if the Kindle will distribute information more efficiently, so far there is little evidence that it will distribute that information more interestingly, more equitably, or more convincingly.

Saturday, February 23, 2008 2:27 p.m.

PS