The extinction of print may not be inevitable, but it should be; the millenia-old practice of inscribing vegetable matter with information and then having hundreds of thousands of copies shipped here and there on trucks and planes is slow, costly, and ecologically unsound, but it’s still the standard procedure.
Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be your standard procedure. The information age alternatives to print have already brought the newspaper industry to its knees, and books appear to be next on the chopping block. This is due in large part to the efforts of Amazon, which took a gamble on the idea that book lovers would abandon their sweethearts in a heartbeat if something better came along. The Kindle, Amazon’s utterly convenient wireless reading device, has proven itself to be that better something – all told, it beats out the book in every imaginable way. Though the Kindle is lighter and smaller than a book, it can hold well over a thousand of them in its memory. And the thousand books in question can be downloaded instantly, rather than having to be tracked down not-so-instantly. They’re also quite a bit cheaper – even bestsellers and new releases go for about $10 off of Amazon via the Kindle, and most go for even less. Nor is one constrained by availability; Amazon has already digitized nearly 300,000 of the books it sells, and the company points out that of the 112 books to be found on the New York Times Bestseller List earlier this year, 109 were available on the Kindle. The little device can even read its content to you out loud, making it perfect for parents whose young children have poor taste in bedtime stories.
All in all, the Kindle makes a hell of a case for itself. I mean, I helped a little bit.
