“Kindle” is the name Jeff Bezos, of Amazon Empire on Planet Buyme, named an electronic reading device that he hopes will make paper books, well, less papery. Save trees. Have a closed purchase system with Amazon only, with Amazon storing all scans of the book, as well as all customer buying habits, and customer comments that the Kindle allows a reader to ‘write’ in the margins of the electronic book. And more.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”

Me too. Maybe you too? Growing up in a house without books, even though I’d had back then what was called ‘a reading and writing problem’ (maybe you did too?) made me long to have a book, any book.

Do you know what I mean? So many books, once you opened them, you were almost exactly like the child in The Neverending Story by Michael Ende.

In that story, a mob of creepy kids were chasing a young boy through the dusk rain. The child ducks into an antiquarian bookstore. There in the dark, a grumpy old bookseller reads a book under a single golden light. The old man tells the child that the book he is reading, ‘is not safe.’

When the old bookseller rises to answer the telephone, the child touches the book the old man was reading. The child is so suddenly filled with SOMETHING, he can barely stand it… longing, yearning, hope, joy.

Without thinking, the child steals/borrows the book. He has to have it. He runs out of the shop and climbs to an attic where he begins to read this magical sheaf of pages.

The book he has stolen from the old bookseller, opens literally into an entirely different and magical world where he himself is irrevocably poured, body, mind and spirit, a world wherein there is a NOTHING that is devouring the land and people and creatures
and in this land are also important thoughts to be thought,
important things and beings to realize and rescue,
important oddities to understand,
important griefs and losses,
important because they all reach way past the ego
and into the soul.

Important because they tear away the security of a child’s rote learnings, and replace those thin gruels with the mythic and the nourishing … the proportions of which are real and able to be translated into pragmatics and heroics in everyday life in reality… one of the greatest troths between reader and compelling story… the awakening of, the teaching of a greater mind that stands beyond ‘the little monkey ego mind’ alone.

The Kindle, a reading device touted on Amazon as a way to read many books at once that are downloaded into it electronically, wirelessly –and whatever you write into the tablet will be safely stored on Amazon’s server– well the little machine sort of looks like a slab of palest blue-gray cheese, but an interesting plastic in its own way, for some kinds of reading, I would imagine.

A $400 plastic thing, I don’t know. I mean, a computer is expensive and looks like and acts like a magical castle of wonders, complete with gremlins and trolls. But, the Kindle? I’ve thrown a few books at the wall in all my life. (They did not turn into princes, they remained utterly toadly.) But, if it’d been a book on a Kindle I was throwing, that’d be $400 down the toidy.

The Kindle weighs nearly a pound and would also quite damage the plaster. Crash, shatter, tinkle. I think there must be some distinct advantages to paper. For the reader. For the book. Certainly, for the wall.

Well, for those who might buy or bypass the Kindle, it might be important to note that Amazon until two days ago, was also selling uranium…

Then Amazon pulled the plug on uranium and this message was posted on many blogs about that matter: “Amazon’s halted sales of uranium through its website but John Iovine from Images Scientific Instruments says, “For anyone who wishes to purchase the uranium ore, it is perfectly legal and license exempt, they can purchase this uranium ore sample or a number of license-exempt radioactive isotopes directly through our website.”

I don’t think we should mention this to Mahmoud.

But, as per the Kindle, I’d say if Steve Jobs feels like it, he will have a better one, faster one, more magical one in the prototype stage by tonight… one that will in its own way be elegant, and perhaps expensive, but it’ll also include a broadcast quality film camera, a laser keyboard that opens to full size on any surface, including in thin air. All we’ll need to provide… is the attic.

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Read other bloggers’ short humorous takes on Kindle:
Mother May I Sleep with Treacher? Frequently Asked Questions About the new Amazon Kindle (humor)

from Three Percent via Cracked: Sarcastic Humor vs. Technology

and an interesting blog post at Silicon Alley Insider by Kafka on “blogs for sale,” Bezos made available to Kindle readers last week, access to over 300 blogs on his device for .99 to 1.99 per blog per month. I know.

and this one at Critical Noise, that is interesting about adapting Kindle in ‘concept only’ for distribution (there’s Bezos closed system idea again) in/by the music industry.