It’s one of our favorite things to worry about, isn’t it? The expiration of The Book as we know it?
Well, check out what Amazon’s advertising on its homepage: The Kindle.
Watch Toni Morrison and Neil Gaiman extol its virtues.
I think the lack of backlighting is its strongest feature, but it still lacks a color screen. Are they trying to cater to those of us most hesitant to replace paperbacks? The video sure sells it hard: it’s just like a book, but it’s a whole lot of books all in one. This isn’t like marketing an iPod; book readers are trickier.
And that video certainly isn’t targeting a young, hip audience. I’m not especially wowed. Ten dollars for a novel onscreen seems like a pretty steep price. Newspapers are “automatically delivered” to it every morning, but isn’t NYTimes.com enough?
How scared are we? On a scale of one to ten?