The Kindle Reader's Clip Light

I typed “can you lend” in the Google search box and the very first result in its anticipatory menu is “can you lend books on a kindle.” The answer is a qualified “Yes” – or a qualified “No” if you’re of a captious disposition.

When the technophiles complain about the same things that the luddites do, you know you’ve got a killer. As explained in this kvetching post at techdirt.com from October 25, “Apparently, Amazon is adding a feature to the Kindle that will let you lend [e]books to other Kindle users.”

Here are some of Amazon‘s ingenious improvements on the printed book:

• You can only lend the ebook for 14 days.
• You can only lend your ebook (it is your ebook – isn’t it?) once.
• And, of course, you can only lend it to other people who have paid $139.00 and up for a Kindle.

But get this: The new, lendable ebooks will be just like real printed books in a least one excellent respect: you, the lender, can’t read your ebook while it’s out on loan. Isn’t that smart? It really is like a real book.

Also, unlike a real, printed book, “Publishers will be able to enable, and disable, lending on a book-by-book basis,” according to this cheerleading article at macworld.com.

And as we learned from Amazon’s deletion of George Orwell‘s 1984 (see the original MobyLives report), ultimately, you read your ebook at the discretion of the vendor.

And as we have learned from Amazon’s recent capitulation to Senator Joe Lieberman, you may ultimately be reading your ebook at the discretion of somebody else who shall remain nameless.

Despite the many obvious and aforementioned disadvantages of the Kindle (you will never again be able to approach an attractive stranger on the subway platform and devise a conversation based on a shared interest in the book she’s reading), it does have one or two advantages over the printed book. Capacity is an obvious one. And, I thought, batteries not withstanding, that its self-contained light source would be another. Apparently not. I know that users debate optimum screen readability [footnote1] but surely not having to carry a lamp around with you is critical to the device’s utility. Nevertheless, in time for Christmas gift-giving, the Container Store catalog advertises an eReader Clip Light which promises to “enhance visibility of the text.” It has a sturdy clip that fits on top of the eReader or its cover. Batteries included.

[footnote1] “The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

“This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?”

Nicholson Baker, “A New Page”