Ebooks Aren’t New, But Will Amazon’s New Handheld Reader Finally Make Them Popular?

Yesterday, Amazon’s main man, Jeff Bezos, took the press for a ride to a predicted future where trees grow as they please, no longer threatened by pulp-hungry paper mills, and where the invention known as the e-book finally gets the acclaim it’s been due.

That is, if such critical celebration is even warranted. Which is somewhat difficult to say definitively at the moment. Difficult for me to say, anyway.

Why? It all has to do with the medium – meaning text; the printed word – and how the medium is delivered to the reader. The reader, as in you. Not Amazon’s Kindle, or any similar device. Okay, yes, the device itself is quite critical to the equation’s completion, but more importantly, it’s the experience an e-book affords in and of itself. Which is pretty peculiar, in my view.

Bezos’ e-book project, on the whole, is the almost certainly the best to arrive for public consumption to date. The fact that the item (as hideous and aesthetically antithetical to the seemingly standard benchmark set by Apple’s simplistic iPod-iTunes setup) is a complete package out of the box shows superbly intelligent execution that, if anything, the you-don’t-need-a-PC-to-work-this-thing-properly factor is what will push it to the winner’s pedestal. Really, the convenience of it, the ability to literally (what a word to use here, eh?) download a bestseller or a classic on a whim, anywhere a Sprint EV-DO connection can be had, is, quite simply, fantastic.

Yep, fantastic. Barring the strange design of the Kindle and the fact that package is absolutely nothing like having epoxy-bound pages in one’s hand (despite the many analogous arguments made thus far in defense of modern e-ink displays), the concept-turned-reality of download-and-read-right-now is a very, very strong selling point.

Want Steven King and Grisham to go? Search ‘em out via the wireless connection, click download, and ta-da: you’ve got several hundred pages of prose to peruse. You can subscribe to newspapers as well, and even access a selection of popular blogs. And if that don’t whet your palate for some e-ink readin’, I don’t know what will.

(Strange it is that Amazon charges consumers to subscribe to blogs via the Kindle that are listed in its virtual storefront, but I suppose the company has to try to recoup its investment with Sprint’s wireless data service. I do hope to see soon a public discussion had between Amazon and third-party content providers as to an advertising revenue-share system of some sort, in order that news and RSS feed subscriptions be free of any cost to readers.)

Alright, here’s the thing. E-books aren’t new. They’ve been around for years. They’ve always had a small little niche, supplying geeky PDA-toting consumers with material. Even some laptop-wielding folk are known to enjoy reading tomes on full-fledge computers

But overall, people read books as, well…books. They like having a front cover to open at the start and a back cover to close at the finish. They enjoy the ability revert to past pages without much effort or thought, and prefer to very quickly access latter sections as well. Some wish to highlight lines, write in margins. On occasion, a portion of the general readership, at one point or another, even choose to vent their literary frustrations by ripping entire volumes into pieces.

You can’t do any of that with the Kindle, or any other electronic reader. At least not well, or without causing irreversible damage to said device.

That said, I think the Kindle is undoubtedly the best invention to come of the e-book-reader mill. If any in the industry has a decent chance at becoming something more than a gadget hound’s impulse buy, it’s Amazon’s handheld. And while it’s hard to argue that e-books belong at all in the realm of items relevant to the goings on of the world of Web 2.0, there’s no denying the alluring convenience factor made possible with the inclusion of wireless Internet connectivity in the Kindle, which, I think, is excuse enough to talk about the new delivery here on Profy.

So here’s to wishing Amazon the best on their new venture. Seriously. I myself can’t imagine picking the item up, for the fact that I much prefer something tangible. But for those that can imagine using such a device with regularly, the Kindle is most certainly the best option you’ll find. And, come on, people. You can read blogs on the thing. Blogs! That surely makes it quite nifty indeed, don’t you think?

What do you think about the world of e-books? Will it get some overdue attention? Or is it medium fundamentally flawed? Voice your thoughts in the comments below.