Reflections on Amazon's Kindle

Carolyn Kellog’s Los Angeles Times‘ blog Jacket Copy features a post about Ted Striphas and his take on Amazon’s Kindle. Striphas is an assistant professor at Indiana University and the author of the forthcoming book The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture From Consumerism to Control. The book is due out this Srpring, so we don’t have the book’s Web page up yet but for now you can find out more about his work and the book at his very good blog Differences and Repetitions.

In the Los Angeles Times post, Kellog discusses Striphas’s book and his paper, “Kindle: The New Book Mobile or the Labor of Reading in an Age of Ubiquitous Bookselling.” (You can read a very rough draft of the paper here.) One of the issues Striphas considers in the paper is how the debate about the extent to which the Kindle reproduces the experience of reading neglects other issues. Striphas writes:

A fixation on Kindle’s paradoxically imitative qualities deflects attention from the ways in which Amazon aspires to transform the act of reading itself into an economically lucrative, value-generating activity.

As Striphas suggests the Kindle’s two-way connection to Amazon gives the company the unprecedented opportunity to measure the nitty-gritty details of how and what we read.