Here’s an excerpt from Stephen King’s Review of the Amazon Kindle :
The Kindle isn’t as gratifying as a good book narrated by a great reader…but for what it is, it’s just fine. It’s light, holds its charge, is simple to operate. And for a fellow of my years (a less-than-generous reader recently referred to me in his blog as ”that elderly douchenozzle”), the Kindle has one great feature: You can adjust the typeface. In the printed version of In Pale Battalions, the type is readable but small; after an hour or so, I’d be maxed out. At its highest Kindle magnification, though, the narrative looks twice as big as this, and I can breeze along for twice that length of time, my finger stuttering on the NEXT PAGE button. It’s a boon that makes up for having to charge the gadget at night…which I never had to do with a novel until this one.
Will Kindles replace books? No. And not just because books furnish a room, either. There’s a permanence to books that underlines the importance of the ideas and the stories we find inside them; books solidify an otherwise fragile medium.
But can a Kindle enrich any reader’s life? My own experience — so far limited to 1.5 books, I’ll admit — suggests that it can. For a while I was very aware that I was looking at a screen and bopping a button instead of turning pages. Then the story simply swallowed me, as the good ones always do. I wasn’t thinking about my Kindle anymore; I was rooting for someone to stop the evil Lady Powerstock. It became about the message instead of the medium, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
And did I mention that you can also look up definitions of words that puzzle you as you read? My definition of Kindle: a gadget with stories hiding inside it. What’s wrong with that?
Filed under: reviews
