David Pogue reviews the Kindle 2
Posted: 24th February, 2009 | Filed under: ebooks | Tags: Books, ebooks, kindle, technology | 1 Comment »He makes a similar comment to Stephen Fry:
The point everyone is missing is that in Technoland, nothing ever replaces anything. E-book readers won’t replace books. The iPhone won’t replace e-book readers. Everything just splinters. They will all thrive, serving their respective audiences.
The Kindle: Good Before, Better Now by David Pogue.
It’s a good general point, too, an it goes back to when that ape started using a stick as a tool and turned themselves into a human.
Street performers were not replaced by theatre, theatre was not replaced by cinema, cinema was not replaced by TV, TV has not been replaced by computers… Painting wasn’t replaced by photography, radio didn’t stop newspapers, internet didn’t stop radio…
Still there argument is not entirely true, or, at least, incomplete: there are so many dead-ends – in technoland and in living nature.
How many of the dinosaurs survived to stay on as crocodiles and lizards? and what leap of nature made others into birds? How many species of apes didn’t make it into humans? Wasn’t Betamax killed off by VHS? Didn’t iPod replace Walkman?
Failure is an element of success. I have not failed, Edison famously said. I’ve just found 10000 ways that won’t work.
What really fascinates me, is how those failures come back with roaring success. Flying dinos turned birds, for example, or transistors, all but abandoned in 1920s in favour of lamp technology, coming back in the late 50-s.