it's true that i look to technology to solve many of my day to day problems. for example, i've moved across the country many times in my adult life and easily the biggest chore for me is moving 40 - 50 boxes full of heavy heavy books to each new home. technology mentioned to me that it has some kind of solution to storing huge (and heavy) amounts of information in electronic format, so thought i might listen to what it had for me today.
in the past month, amazon has re-introduced its main contender to the eBook arena (an arena that consists of approximately one other contestant - the sony eBook reader) - the Kindle 2. my initial impression of the kindle 1 was that it was the lamest piece of technology that you could possibly get for $500. it only did one thing (display ebooks), and it looked like it was designed in the 1980s using 1980s technology. it was awkward and clunky and defended its amazing awkward-clunky-crapulence by claiming to offer an experience that was most "book-like".
anyway, first-generation failings aside, the new kindle looks a lot slicker and almost reminds me of those cool PADD things they had on the next generation + star trek series. i went to amazon.ca to look into downloading some environmentally friendly, highly-profitable-to-amazon electronic books, but was dismayed to find that this service was not available in the Canadian store?!?! so fine - i can just go to the american store and ... oh! no.. wait... oh what's this? in order to download my digital book, i need to first register my kindle or iPhone with Amazon. alright! well, at least we're getting somewhere! i just happen to have an iPhone right here... eBooks are forthcoming!!!
leaving aside for a moment the realization that anyone might want an eBook to read on a laptop or a netbook or even a crackberry and that amazon's delivery method totally ignores that market, this should be a relatively straightforward step. after all, i had to wait a year for the iPhone to come to Canada, but now that it is here, there's the apple AppStore and i can get all the same stuff here for the iPhone than anyone can get in the states, right? as lex luthor likes to say, "WRONG." can't get the iPhone kindle reader for the iPhone (or the kindle for that matter) in Canada.
so i see that i now have two options. i could start maliciously downloading pirate-scanned-OCRd copies of books and uploading them to my iPhone via the absolutely free application called Stanza that takes seemingly any text or RTF or ePub document and renders it very passably in eBook fashion on the iPhone. no authors or publishers get paid, but the content seems to be readily available and i get my reading material integrated in my phone/email/digital camera/personal music device for the subway. however, as a rule, i dislike piracy so nix to that.
the other option i have is to go to Shoppers Drug Mart and get a prepaid Mastercard gift card and register a second iTunes account with a fake US address - maybe the White House's address will work. it should because in the five years or so that i've had my iTunes account, i don't think apple has ever sent me a single piece of mail. this will allow me to download the kindle app to my iPhone (as well as a ton of other great iTunes store content that i can't get in canada) and THEN i can legally download licensed versions of the electronic books that i would like to read using my iPhone while i am riding in the subway for an hour each day.
this seems like an awful lot of frustration to avoid packing and unpacking books between moves. and then there's the niceness of the experience of going to the bookstore, roaming around the shelves gazing over the marvel of tens of thousands of covers , looking to make that connection with your next read, and then lovingly turning pages, folding dog-ears and scribbling notes in the margins. like louis CK points out, these are amazing times, and it is probably more important to be amazed at the things we do have!
- g
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