A very interesting interview about the Kindle (Amazon’s e-book). Francis Pisani, a French journalist, gives the pros and cons of this tool and presents the new one : the Nook. I’ll resume it as soon as possible in English !
One month has passed and I feel ready to present you Mr. Kindle, Amazon‘s e-book. In a precedent post, I gave my opinion about this technology and the potential threat it could represent for the book industry. But, since that post I have found very interesting articles about it which made me think out-side the box. One of them was written by Francis Pisani – a French independent journalist who currently lives in San Francisco – on his blog “Transnets”.
Since the day he bought the Kindle (2 years ago), Francis Pisani never goes out without his tool. Indeed, the journalist highlights the fact that e-book are handier than books because of their weight, and because it centralizes in one media a plurality of texts. After recalling the fact that his Kindle hasn’t erase books from his habits, Mr. Pisani explains he prefers reading on his Kindle before going to sleep because it is more easy to manipulate, and there’s no need to turn the pages… Moreover, the Kindle is easier to carry during travels since it enables you not to fill your suitcase with books you won’t read. ( I totally understand this point because each time i’m going on vacations, i use to travel with 4 or 5 books to be sure that one of them will fit with my mood).
Then, Mr.Pisani raises a very important point about the Kindle. Despite all the criticisms you can make, it offers a very precious opportunity : reading and writting at the same time. Because reading does not sound like passivity. Thanks to the Kindle, you can highight the sentences which interest you the most, or transfer several quotations from you E-book to your computer and so on…Eventually, Francis Pisani rejects the theory according to which E-books would be the ennemies of our traditional books since they foster the act of reading (no matter how). In fact, the journalist confides he buys more book now that he has a Kindle.
Francis Pisani doesn’t forget to give us the Kindle’s weaknesses. According to him, it is a transitional technology since many things need to be improved :
- its price is still too expensive : 257 $
- the format of the texts you download isn’t the same from one e-book to another so it is difficult to keep your files when you buy a different e-book
- it is still hard to gather your different texts in files
Eventually, Mr. Pisani compares the Kindle and the Barnes & Nobles’s e-book. The” Nook” offers several possibilities which are not included in the Kindle :
- it has a wifi connexion
- it is colourful
- its user can download texts even if he’s not in the United States
Nevertheless, Amazon maintains its lead over Barnes & Nobles (the most important library of the United States ) since it gathers more than 350 000 texts.
I hope I’ve informed you a little more thanks to the resume and the traduction of this article.
🙂
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