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15 Dec 2008 02:44 pm

Perpetual Reading Machine

Alan Jacobs praises the Kindle:

...once you start reading a book on the Kindle the technology generates an inertia that makes it significantly easier to keep reading than to do anything else. The Kindle, unlike many other artifacts of the digital age, promotes linearity — it creates a forward momentum that you can reverse if you wish, but not without some effort.

The first book I read on my Kindle was Neal Stephenson’s new novel Anathem, a behemoth of a book, and that experience was delightful because there was no awkward manual management of a large heavy book, and limited temptation to repeatedly investigate the book’s apparatus — Anathem has a wonderful glossary to help readers deal with Stephenson’s many neologisms, but my tendency when offered something like that is to wander around in it and forget to get back to the story. Reading Anathem on the Kindle, I knew that I could get to the Glossary if I needed to, but it didn’t constantly tempt me. Instead, I became utterly absorbed in the story itself.

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