Prof Althouse Has Lost It!

I'm a fan and can almost appreciate her being a libertarian and supporting Senator Obama for President. I said "almost."

Her flip-flop on the Amazon Kindle®, however, cannot stand. By all Jeff Bezos holds dear, I must protest.

Althouse had been favorable toward the Kindle and now says she doesn't like it because she misses books' smell (I do give her ten points for using a Buffy reference to back herself up. But Giles was wrong).

I have started a Review Corner post about my Kindle a couple of times and have not finished. There is not a lot to say that has not been said already:

• It is very weird that every square picometer is covered by a button, so you cannot pick it up without pressing something;


• Other than that, the thing is unbelievably awesome in every way.

That about handles the bullet points. I have been a big eBook fan through several generations of product (Althouse's vlog captures the hits). I took my Gemini Rocket eReader to the UK with me the first time I went and was giddy to have nine or ten books loaded up in less weight than a typical hardcover. The Kindle is the PowerBook to the Gemini's Atari 400.The Kindle holds hundreds and takes SD cards for additional storage.

But the great thing about the Kindle is what they call whispernet. This thing is on the Sprint cell network and you can download books anywhere you could make a phone call. Two bucks a month gets you an Instapundit subscription updated several times each day. An "experimental" rudimentary browser lets you surf, access GMail or other Google apps.

Maybe Amazon will sell book scent in a bottle you can spray on your Kindle. I like books as much as the next guy, but I like text and ideas. I've got a 1935 copy of Carl Swisher's biography of Roger B. Taney. And I was finally able to score a reprint of a rare book on Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis written by his brother, George Ticknor Curtis. This softcover was made by copying one of the existing editions.

I'm happy to get both, but the Taney book falls apart in my hands and I hate to even stick post-it flags to mark sections to transcribe. The Curtis book is a reduced size copy of an old book. Both are pretty tough sledding for me to read. The Kindle, conversely, lets me choose the font size, bookmark, and look up words in an online dictionary.

I can email it a PDF or a word document so that I can comfortably read a long technical white paper or proposal. If you buy a computer book, you can download new revisions, usually free of charge, when errors are fixed or material is revised.

The batteries are good, the screen is readable, the weight is -- awesome. You can save money on books, you don't have to move your library.

It's great. Five stars. You want smell, get a dog.

Posted by jk at May 27, 2008 7:40 PM