Never Judge a Book by its Home Page

by Mary Jackson (July 2011)

Kindles flip from page to page. Presumably you can flip back a page, but even if you can do so in seconds, this will be longer than the split second that it takes us to turn back a page when you want to check the name of a character in a novel or to refresh your memory of who is speaking.

If you are reading poetry, of course, you will be flipping backwards and forwards all the time. I wonder how many poems have been included in the 90,000 ready-downloaded books for the Kindle.

Something tells me that I am not going to ask Father Christmas for a Kindle, and I do not think it is just because I am an old fuddy-duddy. The book, in codex shape, really was a brilliant invention. And after the century of Gutenberg and Caxton there really was no looking back.

Naturally, they could read it on a Kindle. But there is a peculiar intimacy about the silent, still code of the printed page. It is simply you and it, with no electric battery, no lit-up screen, no Charlie Tritschler trying to kindle something within me. The birth of Protestantism would not have happened without the prior birth of printing, which immediately established a private liberation to the human race.

Kindle have revealed plans for their next generation platform aimed at traditional book readers who have so far proved to be resistant to the increasingly popular portable e-book reader. More formally known as DE, the dog-eared version of the Kindle has been designed following extensive market research with focus groups of reluctant converts to the new technology.

In a contrast to the sleek lines of the current version the DE has been fashioned from high performance materials to provide a shabby looking player with creased corners, giving the reader the comfortable impression that their book is a well-thumbed edition. This blends seamlessly with the tea and coffee stains that appear randomly on the e-pages.

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