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Amazon's Kindle gets the Nicholson Baker treatment
Posted by Brier Dudley
Nicholson Baker, the novelist who battled to save card catalogs from digitization in 1994, takes on Amazon.com's Kindle in the Aug. 3 New Yorker.
He's pretty skeptical, especially about the Kindle's promise for newspapers. His take after reading the New York Times on the device:
A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio ... The Kindle DX ($489) doesn't save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them -- it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs.
Amen.
But my favorite line is his summation of the media buzz around the Kindle:
Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important -- that it was an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization.
Copyright © 2009 The Seattle Times Company
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