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Many Ways To Burn A Book
In 1953 Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451. It was about a dystopian society where reading had been outlawed and if any written materials (mainly books) were discovered they would be burnt by Firemen. When I heard that the new Amazon Kindle was to be called Fire I could not help but recall the Bradbury story and wonder if it's release was another nail in the coffin of the physical book?
As a resident of London I am often forced to endure the special kind of hell that is our underground system. When it is not being held hostage by its union leader it is the fastest form of transport in this great city. Naturally once you venture down to this subterranean world and hurtle along in steel tube canisters you cannot help to look around at your fellow travellers to see what they have brought along to entertain themselves.
In the old days this was a simple choice. A book. It was small, personal and fitted easily into your pocket or handbag. Some did try newspapers but they mainly annoyed fellow passengers with the constant folding and page turning, which often resulted in said fellow passengers doing that typically English thing of not saying anything in annoyance.
With the advent of Smartphones these soon started to take precedence. Many passengers would stare into their small screened worlds while hurtling along the tracks. Naturally the only downside to this was a complete lack of signal on much of the underground network.
Then the e-reader started to appear. Slowly at first but soon gaining traction. Without much ado passengers would whip out the small grey Kindle and start reading. Fellow passengers would look across, as we do when we have yet again forgotten to bring anything to relieve the boredom, and see the small device with the grey screen but really great display.
Soon the item started to proliferate with all kinds of travellers loosing themselves in their latest reading material. Slowly the vast number that used to read paperbacks were being usurped by this new breed of electronic readers. Naturally some of the newspaper readers still persisted and as a result were still being ignored.
It's easy to see why so many have made the e-reader choice. The Kindle is a lightweight item that feels so comfortable in your hand. The display uses an e-ink system that results in pin sharp resolution that is very comfortable to read, assuming you have a source of light of course. The devices internal memory can hold thousands of books at once and the device remembers where you are when you stop reading.
Another great advantage is there are many books out there that are free and legal to download. You can often find some classic literature that may has passed you by but now is just a quick download away.
Finally the biggest advantage is the price which has continued to fall since the Kindle's introduction. This fact is opening the Kindles availability to an ever increasing market and consumer level.
As I mentioned at the start of my piece the Kindle Fire will soon be joining the line up from Amazon. This will only be in the great US of A with no stated plans as yet for a global rollout. The Fire will allow the downloading of music, movies, TV shows, apps, books and allows you to browse the net. With it's colour display and a pixel density slightly higher than the iPad will it be able to slow the adoption of Apple's device as many are claiming?
I am sure there will be consumers out their that will see the Kindle Fire and the iPad as one and the same with the only difference being the price. However the limitations of the Fire might soon become noticeable. The Fire is definitely a consumption device, something that the iPad was previously labeled as. Both have their own stores and appear to be quite strict what can and can't play on their systems. However I think they are very different beasts and I'm not sure the Fire will dent anyone's desire to have an iPad. Unfortunately I cannot say the same for the rest of the Android tablets out there. I can see the Fire causing all kinds of problems for these manufacturers who were already struggling to compete with the iPads price and are now having to face another competitor at a much lower price point.
However no matter what potential purchasers decide to spend their hard earned cash on there is still one inevitable result. The poor old book will face yet another competitor vying to finally banish it to history and although it might not be the Firemen from Bradbury's story making it go up in flames the result might well be the same as the physical book is banished to the pages of the history books, naturally in e-book format.
-Karl Madden (@claw0101)
Author
Ewen Rankin