It's a safe bet that the Kindle is unlikely to attract people who seldom pick up a book or, on the other end of the spectrum, people who prowl antiquarian book fairs for first editions.Д«ut for the purpose of sizing up a stranger from afar, perhaps the biggest problem with Kindle or its kin is the camouflage factor: when no one can tell what you're reading, how can you make it clear that you're poring over the new Lincoln biography as opposed to, say, He's Just Not That Into You? Do you lose all kinds of wonderful things about seeing the physical book? said Kurt Andersen, the novelist and host of the public radio show Studio 360. It's the faux-intellectual version of sniffing through someone's medicine cabinet. If people jettison their book collections or stop buying new volumes, it will grow increasingly hard to form snap opinions about them by wandering casually into their living rooms.I always notice how many books there are on the bookshelves, and what the books are, said Ammon Shea, who spent a year reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary and published a book about it. And the Kindle, which looks kind of like a giant white calculator, is the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper. If you have 1,500 books on your Kindle - that's how many it holds - does that make you any more or less of a bibliophile than if you have the same 1,500 books displayed on a shelf? (For the sake of argument, let's assume that you've actually read a couple of them.)The practice of judging people by the covers of their books is old and time-honored. Please, they're overlooking the really important concern: How will the Kindle affect literary snobbism? The publishing world is all caught up in weighty questions about the Kindle and other such devices: Will they help or hurt book sales and authors' advances? Cannibalize the industry? Galvanize it? It would really be ironic if it were, she said of the book, which evokes her abiding passion for books as objects.There's a little box on Amazon that reads Tell the publisher I'd like to read this book on Kindle, she said. Anne Fadiman, the author, was relieved to learn that her essay collection, Ex Libris, was not available on Kindle. If you're going to pay that, you're giving a statement to the world that you like to read - and you're probably not using it to read a mass market paperback.Д«ut to other writers and editors, the Kindle is the ultimate bad idea whose time has come. It's really expensive, she said of the Kindle 2, which Amazon sells for $359. And for her, the ownership of an electronic book reader, while not necessarily a badge of literary honor, at least telegraphs a commitment to books.

Rollins's Kindle was crammed with the day's newspapers.) In this honeymoon period of Kindle - when a lot of people don't have them - you can look to see what someone is reading, in the guise of looking at the hardware. Nelson, also the author of So Many Books, So Little Time. SARA NELSON, the former editor of Publishers Weekly, was at a dinner party recently when Ed Rollins, the Republican campaign consultant, arrived carrying a Kindle.And I just said, 'Can I see it?' said Ms.

Solo a star wars storyspace kraken