The Real Genius Of The Kindle

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Tom Weber argues that the real genius of the Kindle is what it doesn’t do:

When my Kindle arrived from Amazon earlier this year, it felt at first like a severely crippled computer. After all, it has a display screen, a keyboard — even a wireless connection and a web browser of sorts. But every time I tried to indulge my digital-media-trained attention span, pausing in the middle of a book or article to check baseball scores or skim a few blogs, the experience was too cumbersome to enjoy.

Over a few weeks, I rediscovered my ability to simply read the book or article I had punched up in the first place. (Just like — gasp! — old-fashioned printed matter.) It’s particularly enjoyable when reading a newspaper or magazine — enough so that I’ve been routinely purchasing some of these publications when I could have grabbed my laptop and read them for free on the web. In effect, I’m paying for the lack of distraction.

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