Bookshop swaps Kindles for real books
Paperback righter
Are you entirely unsatisfied with the digital publishing revolution? Do you curse your Kindle? One bookseller has the answer: it'll swap your unwanted e-book reader for a stack of paperbacks, hardbacks and magazines.
Portland, Oregon-based Microcosm Publishing said it will trade a Kindle - a gadget it slams as "soulless faux-literary technology" - for the device's value in new or used books and mags.
"Most of the store's books are priced in the $2-6 range so a $139-189 trade-in - note: going retail for the Kindle at Amazon's site - you might be carrying your books out in a fleet of wheelbarrows," enthuses the retailer.
So far, only one person has taken Microcosm up on the offer, the bookshop's boss, Joe Biel, told Reg Hardware today, but a "ton" of people have expressed in interest in making the change.
What will he do with them when they arrive? Says Joe: "We are going to build a museum with the Kindles to put with our pagers, laserdiscs and 1990s cell phones." ®
COMMENTS
Meh
Having found little but Top Gear and X-Factor crap on the shelves when I tried to buy something to read late last year, I am now a Kindle convert. The one novel that I liked the look of was still £18 in hardback, sod that.
I commute on a crowded train. I carry an assload of books on my kindle, I usually have a few on the go. Better yet, no-one can judge a book by its cover, so don't mistake me for a pretentious tryhard because I am reading (and greatly enjoying) "A Brief History Of Time", or indeed the tonnes of free classics that I have never got around to reading. Hopefully people just assume it's porn, or John Grisham.
Anyway, I love a physical book, but a large novel can be a problem for busy commutes (the hardback edition of Thomas Pynchon's "Against The Day" got me some VERY dirty looks). If I read at home in a comfy chair, and had access to good meatspace bookshops both new and second-hand, I wouldn't need my Kindle.
However, I own one, and love it. It's very easy on the eyes, and keeps my voracious reading habit fed.
Still, I am sure people hated the idea of movable type, too, preferring scribes..
No
"Are you entirely unsatisfied with the digital publishing revolution?" No.
"Do you curse your Kindle?" No.
"you might be carrying your books out in a fleet of wheelbarrows" That's one of the reasons why not.
Luddite!
"We are going to build a museum with the Kindles to put with our pagers, laserdiscs and 1990s cell phones."
But, arguably, these were all successful products, or at least the forerunners of successful products today: mobile phones and DVD players.
Deriding a new medium for distributing the written word is like a scribe rubbishing the printing press! The current generation of ebook readers may eventually end up in museums but there will be many generations to come or, like the pager, the function will be rolled up into a more general device.
"soulless faux-literary technology"
Surely literature is about the words, the use of language and the ideas and concepts being shared by the author not the delivery medium, especially when that medium is some archaic and ecologically unfriendly!
Sounds like sour grapes from someone not will to move with the times!
Also sounds a lot like pseudo-intellectual bullcrap!
