The Top of a Slippery Slope

When you deal in comic books, as I do, you tend to walk in the fringes of literary critics. I find my closest friends, and the ones I share resources with most often deal with poet-painters, hypertext fiction, painting-poems, visual poetry, video game narratives and so on. Nothing straight forwards and run-of-the-mill like 18th Century Poetry, or Defoe.

Because of this, I have taken a keen interest in the Kindle (and Kindle-like products: the Nook, the Sony E-Reader, etc.). Reading books on the computer has not been new since the onset of the Internet and Project Gutenberg or Literature On-Line which publish many free editions of works that have long past copyrighting. Library databases like EBSCO and Jstor have long had full-text articles for downloading. What the Kindle has done is take the idea of digital text and, like the iPod, made it portable.

There is a history there, as well. Since the advent of the iPod (and iPod like devices: Zune, et. al.), audio books have allowed people to take an entire library, reduce it down to a couple dozen MP3s and take it with you everywhere. And someone will read it to you. Before that, books came on tapes and CDs. Again, Kindle is not the first to try and make an entire library of books more convenient.

What Kindle has done, though, is retain the reading environment as much as it can. Reading is an act, like walking or singing, that is unique unto itself. Listening to a book is completely different, as the reader interprets the text for you through vocal inflections, pauses and so on. The narrative is given to you in one possible interpretation, and the others are inaccessible. When reading, though, the narrative created by individual readers can differs vastly depending on what catches the reader's eye. Of course, this boarders dangerously on relativism, suggesting that meaning is created by each individual reader, and thus the narrative cannot be said to mean anything universally. To skirt this argument, I like to think about a range of meanings; that is, each text will allow a narrow range of possible readings and misreadings, but not all readings are possible.

At any rate, there is a lot of dense narrative and reader-response theory circling these issues, and if you want, you and I can hash those out some other time. The point that I want to retain here is that the Kindle gives the reader a sense of reading. It is lacking the materiality of the book: the place in the narrative is not indicated by the ratio of pages to the left and right of the one you are reading, there is no tangible movement through a three-dimensional space, and the graphic capabilities are limited to what the Kindle can reproduce. These discrepancies aside, the reader's eyes scan a page, and process the linguistic signs.

I like the idea of a Kindle of some things. For example, I have to print and read a TON of articles. Having access to a Library's database helps, because I can grab free, digital copies of the text, but there is no good way to annotate these, and no convenient way to read them unless I want to print it out. Of course, there is no telling how good the article is going to be until I've read it, and, as any academic researcher knows, there might be a lot of chaff to get through before you get to the tasty tasty seed center. Kindle allows the reader to download the PDF files, and the recent Kindle's allow for the reader to annotate the text, as well. In this way, I can save a lot of paper, and have a store of random journal article right at my finger tips.

As a collector, though, I like having books. I like having walls and walls of books that I have read or am waiting to read. If you aren't a collector, it's hard to explain, but I am happiest among my books, CDs and DVDs (maybe, one day, Blu-rays...if I ever get a big boy job). I don't have any ideological problem with the Kindle (hell, I have an iPod), but I like having the object.

That said, I found this to be problematic: Amazon's most recent Kindle pricing scheme. As it stands, the super-souped up Kindle, with 3G and WiFi capabilities to wirelessly download books on the go, runs for $189 (for a scant $190 more, you can get a 9" rather than a 6" screen). The model with just WiFi runs for $139. But, for $114, you can buy a Kindle with "special offers."

Hmmm..., I thought to myself, I like special offers. I investigated what the "special" offer was, and it turns out for a savings of $25, you can have a Kindle Advertising Machine instead of an e-reader. Let me clarify: it still provides electronic versions of books, but your Kindle will be periodically flooded with "special offers". It also runs a screen saver that is sponsored by a company which will use the function to advertise some more. Essentially, what you have done is paid Amazon and the sponsoring companies for the luxury of seeing their advertisements.

Now, I am not against advertisements. In fact, I sort of like ads on things I enjoy for free, like Facebook, other internet pages, network TV stations, the radio and so on. These advertisements keeps Pandora free, allows me to watch the Simpsons three times a night on Fox, and provides the radio station with the funds to keep playing music instead of talking at me. What I am not happy about is dealing with advertisements in things I have to pay a lot of money for. I get annoyed that I have to watch car and cell-phone commercials and still pay $10 to see a movie, or I have to pay hundreds to fly home and still have to watch a commercial for the god damn airline I am on. I get it Swiss Air...the only way you could be more awesome is letting us ride polar bears to our destination.

More than any of them, though, the Kindle really bothers me because of what it opens the gates for. Sure, certain CDs, DVDs and books will come with leaflets for other CDs, DVDs and books I might like to buy by that publisher. If enough people buy into this Kindle with Special Offers, though, these books, CD and DVD publishers will see how viable selling ad space on their commodity would be. Is the consuming public still going to pay $14 for a new paperback that comes with an ad on the back? Or one that places ads strategically throughout the book? Are you going to put a CD into your CD player and hear an ad for the newest Nokia before track one? And then again between track 4 and 5, and three more ads at the end? The same could work with digital downloads: before each song starts you have to listen to an ad.

I know the logical fallacy to this argument: the slippery slope logic suggest corollary actions that have not yet happens and are based on assumptions. Sure. But seeing that Amazon is doing this, I feel it begs the question of where it ends. In the nearby future, is mankind going to have to get used to advertising? Are we just going to take for granted that things cost full price AND come with annoyances?