Kindle Thoughts

This image taken from Amazon website 

I bought a kindle for my wife as a Christmas present a couple of years ago.  She likes to read things on the train etc. so I felt it would be a good $80 gift.  Given our current "no stuff" philosophy, having all our books (especially paperbacks which are usually never read twice) online in the cloud seems like a great idea.  A further bonus is that we have an ipad and iphones, and can read them on there as well.  I like the feel of the kindle and reading it is a pleasure.  Recent reads on it have included Susan Cain's "Quiet", Colin Powell's "It Worked For Me", "No Easy Task: Fighting in Afghanistan" by various Canadian Military Personnel, and have just started "The Mission, The Men, and Me" by Pete Blaber.  My Canadian Military friend recommended that one and its quite a fun read.  Also just read Neil Barofsky's "Bailout" all about TARP and its failings etc.  I might talk about those books in another post but for now I wanted to share thoughts about the Kindle.

One thing you can do with the Kindle is read it on the subway.  But I realized a difference between reading this and a regular book.  If you see someone else on the subway reading a regular book, you can surreptitiously sneak a glace at the cover of the book they are reading.  This information does 2 things.

1. It gives you a bit of a look at the person's personality in a "judge the person by the cover of their book" sort of way.  Not all that relavent unless the book sparks a conversation, which is unlikely in a subway car.
2. If the cover of the book looks interesting to you, you might be tempted, even if only subconsciously, to pick up that book in the near future and read it too.

Whether these two items have any real impact or are just postulations I don't know, but the ability to hide the book cover from other stranger-viewers might also be important.  

I gave my wife Milton Friedman's book "Capitalism and Freedom".  I remember it fondly from undergrad, although I feel like he has a bad name as I think he's been associated with the "cut all government" types, whom I disagree with.  Anyway she was reading it on the train in San Francisco. Someone sitting next to her saw that cover and immediately remarked "oh you're reading Milton Friedman? Perhaps you'd like a different perspective in Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism".  I think the guy thought my wife was a Republican (practically a four letter word in the Bay Area) and wanted to help her see the light.  She also read Naomi Klein's book after that, so the interaction seemed to work.

Regardless of what you think of either Milton Friedman or Naomi Klein, that interaction, and by extension that perspective on Capitalism and Economics would NOT Have happened if she was reading a Kindle.  Although this interaction is more likely to occur in the Bay Area than a NYC subway car, I thought it was interesting to note in case there is something to be taken away from it.  If she had been reading a guilty pleasure such a trashy romance novel for example, then the Kindle becomes the PERFECT medium for reading on the train.  Sort of like reading a comic book hidden inside a large copy of the Iliad.

I will say however one minus of the kindle is the complete lack of images available.  Many of the books that I read are non fiction, and they are of the public servants' or military service type books where there is always a sliver of 5-10 pages of photos in the middle ("this is me shaking hands with the president", "this is me talking with another figure in the book" etc. etc.).  This cannot happen in a kindle book, and I wonder how much is lost because of this.  Perhaps the Kindle is the perfect Fiction medium but loses out when it comes to Non-Fiction?  Perhaps a public library card might be better suited to us if we are worried about what over people will/will not see.