Momma Got Kindle

My 61 year old mother got a Kindle for Christmas. The idea appealed to her somewhat, she thought perhaps she would use it on occasion when she traveled. Now, my mother is not a techno dummy (her son does have a degree in computer science) but she still uses a desktop. She does not Facebook or Twitter, nor will she ever. She did not even have WiFi in her house.

Without WiFi, your Kindle needs to be hooked up to the PC and the books uploaded. That's a few more steps than most people will do on a whim. Of course, that's where I came in. As it turned out, she had a WiFi DSL router in her house supplied by her ISP. So naturally I hacked into the router and enabled the wireless. Then I quickly set of the WiFi on the Kindle and about a million books became a finger push away.

The next time I went to my mother's house, she sent me away with a shopping bag of about fifteen books. My mother has always been a reading machine, devouring books at a rapid rate, and leaving the leftovers to me. I'm usually about ten books behind her at a given moment, so there is always a pile of books for me to read around the house. But since the Kindle, I've been deluged with books. But that looks like the end of the line. I doubt my mother will ever buy another paperback again.

At first I looked at this as a sign of The Coming of Gozer, but it is so easy for people to buy an eBook with this device, they can't help themselves. It's not just easy, it's convenient to the point of books becoming an impulse item once again. Years ago, I remember as a kid supermarkets used to put books on the impulse racks. Over the years they seemed to have been replaced by candy and magazines. But at least where I grew up in New Jersey, books used to be on many of those racks.  Most of them were romance novels, but some were thrillers and other genres. I imagine there are places where that still is the norm, but I don't see it often. In most cases markets and drug stores have a book section, but that is usually where the books stay. If you do not seek them out they won't find you.

With the Kindle, it's even easier than an impulse item. You type in a name, or a genre or whatever you want and zap, an 80,000 word novel is in your hand. It's so intuitive it's ridiculous.

I've heard people say these devices are the best thing to happen to authors since the printing press. Right now it is so cheap and easy to buy a book, it may effectively destroy the "second hand" book market. It occurred to me that many of the books my mother used to buy were used books. An author makes no money on a used book. I know in theory said buyer is supposed to then go buy a new book by that author. I agree that's valid on some level. However, the reality is that might not happen either. In which case the author was nothing but a pimp for the store.

Of course, stories of accidental discovery ... "I found this book on the beach and it changed my life" ...will not really have an equal in the eBook world. But on the flip side, authors will sell more directly. People like my mother will take a chance on an unknown author because it's so damn easy to do it. And why not? It didn't cost any gas to get it, it was only $2.99, and if it sucks you can delete it.The Kindle user sees little downside in buying a book they might have otherwise passed on. So authors will benefit in ways they might not have in traditional paperback, even if we lose some of the paper perks.

It's a weird new world and I guess we have to roll with it. We are not going to stop this snowball from gathering speed so we either get out of the way, or we jump into the icy cluster and hang on until it explodes into something else. It was my mother's reaction to Kindle that convinced me to eBook The Sweet Sixteenth - I wanted to learn the eBook process first hand before I was scrambling to catch up. Because if my mother can abandon paperbacks, anyone can, and everyone will.