Can the Kindle catch fire?

Fast forward to two weeks from today, when many of us will be ambling through the aisles of T.I.S., scouring its stacks for this semester’s textbook installment and exchanging elbows with fellow disgruntled students.

Now imagine that you’re a student preparing for classes at Princeton University, where, instead of lugging a heavy book crate through crowded bookstores, you pick up (for free) Amazon’s Kindle DX electronic reader, which will already contain downloaded reading material for your fall classes.  

For students participating in a pilot program at Princeton, this is precisely what’s happening. The project is intended to reduce the consumption of paper that would normally be used for textbooks and other reading materials, and if it proves successful – essentially meaning that students are still able to learn and perform effectively despite the absence of traditional class materials – expect similar initiatives to pop up across the country.

As evidenced by the Princeton project, Amazon continues aggressively marketing the Kindle despite varied reviews and historically mediocre sales. The company’s CEO Jeff Bezos recently claimed that Kindle purchases represent 35 percent of book sales for titles available in both print and digital editions. Amazon has lowered Kindle’s price to $299 and has, so far, been willing to sustain a loss on many of its top-selling titles by offering them well below the cost of an equivalent print.  

Kindle also has on its side the current climate of increased digitalization. Print journalism is slipping into obsolescence at an astounding rate, and Rupert Murdoch’s recent decision to charge users for all of News Corp.’s online content by July 2010 illustrates his confidence in the demand for digital news.  

Peter Osnos, a senior media fellow at The Century Foundation, has been offering a similar argument for several years. He asserts that books need to “adapt to the growing importance of screens, mobile devices, earphones and the sense among readers that they should be able to get whatever they want on demand instead of searching for it.”

Osnos’ is a typical summation from the pro-Kindle camp. Digital books provide a more environmentally sustainable infrastructure for fostering widespread literacy, Kindlers argue. And because more people are used to reading their news, watching their weekly sitcoms, and downloading their favorite music all online, then book-reading, too, must go digital.  

Yet the physical book, or at least the kind worth reading, is not a medium that lends itself to our on-demand, attention-deficit, hyper-stimulated digital culture. Serious, contemplative reading, and especially textbook reading, almost always demands marginal note-taking and precise citation methods; Kindle prevents the former technique by its lack of actual pages and the latter by its lack of actual page numbers.
Of course, serious reading might not be the average Kindler’s cup of tea. Peter Smith of ITworld, said the e-book’s success is “fueled by the romance and erotic romance market.”   

But meaningful literature is not a thing to be consumed like MP3s and newspaper articles. It is not so transient a medium, and even a digitalized age cannot make it such. The Kindle can save trees, but it cannot produce smarter readers or a more thriving culture.