To Kindle or Not to Kindle?

I haven’t read a book in years. I mean really read a book the way I used to. As a "low vision disabled" person, the print on an average book is pretty much a gray blur to me. If I squint and strain and focus very hard, I can read along at the pace of your average third grader, unless I lose my place, after which it takes ages to find the line I was reading – and squint and strain again.That's the breaks when your vision is 20-600.

So I read with a machine. It’s a big thing, like the original computer with a screen. I place the book on a table and slide the book back and forth beneath a closed-circuit camera that projects a highly magnified version of the book onto a black and white screen. I can read that no sweat. The letters are huge. People 30 feet away can read over my shoulder. It’s a great machine and I owe my career to it. But the machine weighs 45 pounds and you have to plug it in. So when I read, I read sitting up in front of the machine. I don’t read in bed, in the bathroom, or on planes, or bookstores, or out on a blanket at the beach. If I want to read the directions on a can of soup, I go into my office, warm up my giant reader, and stick the can under the camera. It ain’t handy, but you get used to it.

So the arrival of the Amazon Kindle intrigues me all to pieces. This electronic reader weighs only 10 ounces. (The last book I wrote weighs four pounds by comparison.) The battery lasts a week between charges, they say, and one can download books from any place one can receive a Sprint cell phone signal. Books download wirelessly in about a minute and the connection comes free with the Kindle.

What interests me most about the Kindle is its ability to enlarge fonts up to 20 points high. There are 72 points in an inch. Normal books and newspapers are anywhere from 7 to 12 points. As I’m writing this essay, I’m typing on a computer in Arial Bold, one of the few fonts I can clearly see. I type in a 12-point font, but I blow-up the image to 150%, which I assume is the equivalent of 18 points. To the normal eye, that would be a small newspaper headline. To me, it’s as small as I can go. The Kindle says it reaches a maximum of 20-points high. It isn’t back-lit, which helps me see. But the new technology reportedly looks like ink on paper. That, to my poor eyes, is sort of black on gray. Yet I’m betting dollars to donuts I can see this sucker. If not, I’m no worse off.

A lot of people have been highly critical about the Kindle. The fundamentalists yammer on about how it will never replace the book, as if that matters. My wife and I eat lunch in the car sometimes when we’re on a trip, but we don’t expect the car to replace the kitchen table. The Kindle is a tool to be used where and when it is convenient. In my case, "convenient" is reading anywhere EXCEPT the one place I’ve been forced to read for the last 10 years.

The skeptics bitch on about the placement of the buttons, about the $400 price tag, about the speed of the wireless hook-up, or the cost of the downloads (about $10 for a bestseller or $14 a month for the New York Times). Heck I haven’t seen a bestseller or a newspaper in ages. I never read for pleasure since so much of my day is taken up in front of my giant machine reading for work. That machine cost $3,000. Can you imagine how cheap the Kindle sounds to me?

And I was all set to buy one for myself for Christmas in 2007 when – bam – as soon as Amazon president Jeff Bezos announced that the Kindle was for sale, he announced that they were sold out. Then Amazon posted a note saying – Sorry, we won’t have any new ones this year. Imagine if they had announced a new super-dooper wheelchair that weighs only a few ounces, goes 60 mph and costs peanuts, and then said – Sorry, we don’t have any left. People who use wheelchairs would be rioting.

But for some reason my fellow hard-of-seeing mates have not raised a peep. That is, I assume, because people see the Kindle as just another way for perfectly-sighted people to read what they can already read in paper form. Low visioners have become used to sitting in one place, or listening to very expensive badly-read books-on-tape. Or maybe their minds have all gone to mush from reading the crappy stuff available in "Large-Print" format at their local libraries – mostly Reader’s Digest, gothic romances and detective mysteries. Or maybe they’ve given up on reading altogether and given their souls over to their TV sets.

If the Kindle isn’t a revolution for you, Dear Reader, it’s going to be a revolution for me. As soon as Jeff Bezos stocks back up, I’m getting mine. And then I’m going to the library, or a coffee shop, or even out onto Smuttynose Island where there is no electricity at all. Then I’m going to download the newest most frivolous book on the bestseller list, ramp up the font size, an do what you probably don’t even think twice about – read.

Copyright © 2007 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.