Those Australians get more fascinating by the hour.

Jeff Bezos was talking to Charlie Rose about Kindle, earlier this month.  He came across like a madman.  I guess I would not mind if Santa Claus left a Kindle in my stocking, but I do not think I am quite ready to put up $200 of my own.

For certain kinds of readers, e.g. those who travel a lot, it is possible that Kindles are a good idea.  I cannot say if I would be that kind of reader, though  -- of course, having, say, the complete Penguin Classics available would be a nice inducement to take it for a test drive.

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

That's pretty funny--attacking the book trade as consumptive and wasteful and then suggesting that people should read e-books via cell phones.

(You seem to be assuming that we all already have cell phones.)

As Alan Durning and Northwest Environment Watch said, libraries are among the greatest green inventions of all time.  Cell phones, on the other hand, are some of the most environmentally destructive inventions of all time, just in terms of the hundreds of millions discarded annually--not to mention all the power consumed in manufacturing, in erecting and powering the environmental blight of cell towers, in contributing to greatly increased auto accident rates, and in the rude behavior of the cell phone users (which is rampant).

The idiocy of the popular press is a consequence of one policy: the publisher's return policy, which lets bookstores order without regard to expected sales (to fill shelves and seem fully stocked in a wide array of subjects).  

There is no other trade in which the seller has managed to shove all the risk onto the wholesaler.  Eliminate or greatly modify this return policy and you will see publishing quantities change radically and thus the great waste will be reduced.

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

God luv ya, Avagee, your heart is in the right place, but it will be a long time before I willingly follow your advice.

In our society at least, cell phones are instruments of social decay.  They are vermin, which corrupt and destroy; they reproduce, not by sexual intercourse, but by the dreamy seduction of human users, who are deceived into accepting the fantasy that cell phones are indispensable, and ought to be omnipresent.

I have never owned a cell phone, and hope I never will have to own one.

More important than my dislike (subjective, yes, but hardly unique or eccentric) of cell phones is the great value inherent in the act of reading.  Probably some people are comfortable reading texts, however they can be made to appear, in the diminutive windows of certain cell phones.  But can anyone seriously hope to persuade us that that should be a typical happy, serene reading experience?

By the way, the small library available from booksinmyphone.com is OK, but hardly satisfactory.  One would like more bibliographical information before downloading, for one thing.  And it should be recognized that many of their classics in translation do not use up-to-date or otherwise superior translations.

Jeff Bezos is so very proud of Kindle, because that instrument carries over some of the best and most attractive features of reading a well-designed portable book.  The instrument is made with book-readers and book-lovers in mind.

Santa Claus did not bring me a Kindle this Christmas, which I do not interpret at all as a comment on whether I have been naughty or nice.  In fact, I am happy to wait for the Mark 2, having doubts about this virginal model.  It does apparently do a lot of neat things.  But I wonder if it can accomplish easily everything that, say, a reader of Dante's Divine Comedy in an English translation would want it to.  Typically, reading Dante in a well-constructed paperback edition allows the reader immediate access to both the English translation and the Italian original on the facing page; notes are necessary, and these are available either as footnotes (preferable) or endnotes (acceptable).  Can a Kindle screen make it possible to have quick access to all that information?

Also, when I read, I orient passages, subconsciously, according to where they are located on the page, e.g. left or right; top, middle, bottom; at the beginning, middle or end of a paragraph.  It is possible that Kindle can allow for that kind of visual-physical acquaintance with a text, but I would need to see it to believe it.

In principle, it would be terrific to be able to have books without having to cut down trees.  And I am very willing to welcome new solutions.  But reading is an activity of fundamental cultural and personal importance, and so we need to be very demanding that any proposed solution be quite satisfactory in nearly every way.

Meanwhile, here we are still in the age of cutting down trees, and I wonder: of all the paper that is produced, how much goes into making books?  And of all that goes into books, how much goes into what is of low value and temporary, and how much goes into what should be conserved in libraries, both public and private?

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.