Check out this hidden lede, about 1/3 of the way through the story:
The success of the ebook is being fueled by the romance and erotic romance market,” Peter Smith, of ITworld, reports. Smith cites the actress and Kindle enthusiast Felicia Day, of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” who has been bingeing on paranormals like “Dark Needs at Night’s Edge.” “I’ve read like, 6 books this week and ordered about 10 more,” Day blogged. “It’s stuff I never would have checked out at the Barnes and Noble, because the gleaming and oily man chests would have made me blush too much.”
As someone that reads books semi-regularly and as a result carries them around with him 95% of the time (Stephen King once wrote that you never know when you're going to get a spare 10 minutes, and that's true), it's cool to be able to look--physically, simply look over at some other person sitting at a park bench and see: "Oh they're reading the new Dan Brown novel, avoid this person as though they were plagued."
Kindle eliminates that, eliminates the tiny, infintesimal sliver of connectedness that physical books offer. I know, reading is a solitary activity and you don't see people getting together for reading sessions (although I once spent a magical afternoon with three other people reading the books that I had thrown around my car, which is important to do because You Never Know) and blah blah blah, but do we really need to replace this sense of intellectual self-branding and -advertisement with a formless tablet. I suppose that the Kindle itself is a conversation piece ("Oh, you have $300 to spend on something that looks like "a wet newspaper" too!"), but only will be as long as it's novel (i.e. in the same way that iPods once were**.)
Yes, it is possible and even likely that the Kindle or things like it could revitalize a flagging publishing industry and is probably damn good for the rainforest. Think of the elimination in environment, social, and financial costs of having to process trees into paper, and then think about the ease of buying a book--downloading it in 60 seconds versus spending 100 times that in a bookstore--and you have a relatively simple math. The Kindle WILL be good for people that want to publish books (not necessarily the publishing industry) and especially self-publishers. Hell, it might even eliminate the pesky problem of editors and publishers entirely.
But the thing is that I kind of LIKE going to the bookstore (and I might be in the minority on this and now that I'm thinking about it there will always be somewhere that I can go to be surrounded by stacks of printed word on processed pulp), and the Kindle is just one in a string of ever-increasing reasons never to leave my house. You don't even have to wait the annoying three days until Amazon drops the book off at your house, you don't have to deal with the hassle of the magical old-book smell, you don't have to have all that disgusting human history involved with the acquisition of old and therefore cheap books.
Kindle creates an experience that is unique to you (no trading or swapping), and homogenized and sanitized for your benefit. It will doubtless keep improving, providing sharper contrast, more titles, better solutions to the problems of displaying in-text graphics, and probably eventually replace books as a better reading solution. But that sucks, and I'm going to go back to reading the copy of "The Prince" that I bought for a dollar.
*Not available on the Kindle.
**I once handwrote a semi-long, serious essay about the social aspects of iPod ownership, but I've lost that, and I was 14 or 15 at the time.
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