I rather wish the Amazon Kindle was connected with some sort of lending library. Especially with regards to current events, buying a hard-copy text for $50 is far too much but so too $15 for a Kindle version, if even one such exists. My American Library copy of Thoreau’s longer works is well-thumbed and increasingly taking on the character you might expect of a book found at the bottom of a NATO rucksack, but I cannot see that I would read Edith Sheffer’s “Burned Bridge” more than once. In my subjective experience, a book, no matter how well written, is either a low re-use commodity or a continual companion. I should like to see the former in free or nearly so libraries and the latter being the pleasant detrious of my life. If Amazon were to enslave my Kindle to an optional subscription-funded library I would eagerly pay. Similarly, I believe that public libraries would do well to offer digital versions of public domain works in open formats, but the toolset for that requires substantial work to create, not to mention device incompatibilities to be surmounted. (Worse, many non-fiction ebooks that I have found tend to be poorly formatted, having bad line breaks or forced indentation. Fixed form media habits die hard, I suppose.) It is primitive days, yet.

Curmudgeonly addendum: I find it to be a great sorrow that of such mobile work as is being done a not insignificant portion is directed toward amusing ourselves to death.

1. troutwine posted this