Collect your Kindle-ing

So there's no question that Apple's "ipad" will be the sexiest e-reader to hit the market (notwithstanding its unfortunate product name), but there's still a strong something to be said for the product that sparked the... dare I say it... the "e-reading revolution": Amazon's Kindle.

Perhaps the Kindle does a appear a bit outdated. But perhaps this seemingly 'one trick pony' is exactly the device we need in our distracting digital world. One aspect of the traditional book that I'll always love is the way it forces me to focus on only one task: reading. (Ok, maybe two or three, if you separate "thinking" and "writing" from "reading," which I do not necessarily do.) In fact, while reading a mystery from Stieg Larsson on my Kindle, I found the keyboard a useless appendage--taking up precious space on the page. I suppose I still more quickly reach for pencil and paper than availing myself of the fairly primitive note-taking function of the Kindle. By extension, I wonder if I'll become dizzyingly overworked when I have beautiful graphics, crisp images and moving pictures, and the seemingly infinite resources of the web and all the apple apps at my finger tips w/ the ipad. What will reading become when we move from a single use, wood pulp book--and, yes, again, some such books have more than one use: I've used books to balance tables and act as tea cup coasters, after all!--to the all-in-one digital reader? (Why, for example, should the ipad necessarily still be classified as an electronic reader? Has it not already exploded that category?) Of course, I suppose the same questions can be asked as we moved from stone tablet to papyrus to vellum and animal skins to the wood pulp and recycled paper of today. What, finally, does it mean "to read"?

With these thoughts in mind, here's a small, random sampling amid the myriad books you can read on a Kindle--and, if you download the Kindle app, on your ipad, too--about the ups and downs of electronic (digital, hypertext, etc.) reading:

The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, Robert Darnton (2009)

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins (2008)

The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book), Sherman Young (2007)

From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts, Peter L. Shillingsburg (2006)

Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Jay David Bolter (2001)


Oddly, these are not available on the Kindle... but should be!

New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (2009)

Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, N. Katherine Hayles (2008)

My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, N. Katherine Hayles (2005)

Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet H. Murray (1998)


Please suggest additional titles under Comments for this post.