Ah, The True Potential of the Kindle

While the critics expound on what the new Kindle concept lacks, it is important to take a peak at where the concept could be headed. When one begins to let their imagination run, the potential of this new device to revolutionize teaching and learning, as well as the literary world, is readily in front of us.

Kindle is a Mobile Learning Device
Though currently designed to simply purchase a book and then make it readable on a digital screen, the new Kindle is precisely the mobile type of device that creates an unorganized tether to other information. In essence, it is a permanently connected Internet device as well as a gadget that displays books.

So with just the twitch of a finger, a wealth of information is available to the potential user. Some would argue that most of the information is inherently a distraction but there is of course info that can totally enhance the reading experience.

Think back to the days when you were first introduced to one of the more classic novels, something like “A Tale of Two Cities”. Remember the teacher expounding on key background information, historical and otherwise, all with a goal of making the work more understandable to you the reader. It seemed to me that my teacher went on and on and by the time we got started reading I was already bored.

Transforming the Literary Experience
Transform to the Kindle and the option for Internet access. Instead of a lengthy purview to the novel, the reader immediately gets started and stops only when the need to investigate a historical aspect is upon them. Instead of learning something ‘just-in-case” we have that new idea of “just-in-time” and “just-as-needed.”

There is also no making a list of vocab words to research and find in some dictionary, when such a word appears, skip onto the Internet and look it up at a site like dictionary.com. As the concept develops, the E-reader would allow for direct linking to the Net, in other words the reader could link directly to a web page for a word that is not easily understood, a passage that is complex, or even a historical summary of a key event mentioned in the text.

It is easy to see how a device like the Kindle could indeed enhance the reading experience as well as transform learning as we know it.

Annotated Books
As but another example, I think of Karl Rove and his recent speech this weekend where he insists that it was Congress that rushed the nation into the Iraq War, not the Bush administration. Rove made his statement and announced he was planning to put that in his memoir when he writes it.

Keith Olbermann on Countdown took Rove to task and provided numerous pieces of evidence that refuted the claims of the man known as Bush’s brain. That leads to an interesting potential scenario if books reach full e-form.

After Rove authors his text, it would be possible for another writer, an Olbermann perhaps, to author an annotated version of the same book which could then be made available for purchase. In Olbermann’s work he could highlight and link to the very evidence that refutes an improbable claim, etc.

Books Become a Work in Progress
In other words, a book would no longer be a truly finished product as there really is no final version for print purposes. The text could always be written again, in theory to be improved upon, and done so again and again. In many instances, writing could become more a collaborative task, the complete antithesis of its current status at least within the so-called literary world.

Bezos is indeed onto something with his new device and like the concept of the Internet itself, where this little gadget will take learning as well as the literary world is truly without limit.