Beyond words: the Kindle Fire and the book’s future
Filed Under (Industry Biz News) by Admin on 28-09-2011
The future arrives wearing the clothes of the past. The first book that came off a printing press – Gutenberg’s Bible – used a typeface that had been meticulously designed to look like a scribe’s handwriting: The first TV shows were filmed radio broadcasts. The designers of personal computers used the metaphor of a desk for organizing information. The world wide web had “pages.” The home pages of online newspapers mimicked the front pages of their print editions. As Richard Goldstein succinctly put it, “every novel technology draws from familiar forms until it establishes its own aesthetic.” It’s tempting to look at the early form of a new media technology and assume that it will be the ultimate form, but that’s a big mistake. The transitional state is never the final state. Eventually, the clothes of the past are shed, and the true nature, the true aesthetic, of the new technology is revealed. So it is with what we call “electronic books.” Amazon’s original Kindle was explicitly designed to replicate as closely as possible the look and feel of a printed book: When Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, introduced the Kindle in late 2007, he went out of his way to…
