The priest looks severe from the altar the faithful middle-aged, compunto, is plunged with the look on the phone, playing blessed during the mass. Then, with a look alert the sacristan that he rebukes the lord, “No messages during the functions!”. Blushing, the lord turns the video phone where via Kindle Cloud downloaded the Roman Missal, Ordinary Time, by following the Scriptures of the Sunday.
episode, the real, is a confirmation of what, ten years since the launch of the Kindle, the culture of the ebooks, via tablets, computers, smartphones, has permeated the life. Baptizing, in November 2007, Jeff Bezos, dad yesterday to Amazon and savior today in the Washington Post, said the lapidary of the “Kindle is the most important thing we have ever done.” The first Kindle for e-books was not a access to your library online, such as the one downloaded by the faithful in the church, but a tablet that heavy plastic 300 grams, with a wheel from an old radio transistor and the keys as big as grains of pepper. The screen was trying to mimic the page of a book and the characters, as splattered by a thick ink, appeared slowly, one after the other.
With the bag the weight of the first volume of War and Peace you could carry around half a library. Borges and Eco, had cultivated the worship of books in the stack as the mystery and saga, and now you could be on the nightstand a whole ton. The ebook market took off, from $ 20 million in 2006 to 53,5 2008. A treat for the authors amateurs, finally free to publish even after the No stentorei of j. j. and Einaudi. From then on, the clunky Kindle it becomes an elegant tablet, the Kobo and the others are competing, and Bezos port the format on every screen, table, bag, pocket.
The e-book is a gift to the culture, I read in parallel the thousands of pages of the biography of Hitler, Kershaw, and the first two monumental volumes of the biography of Stalin by Kotkin (the third and final is expected soon), if I had to drag myself behind the paper books I have obtained scoliosis and sprains to the wrist, as well as fermi denials by the steward for Ryanair at the moment of take-off. On my Kindle cloud, I take notes, I underline, in yellow or blue, I begin a book on the computer in the studio, I face it in a tablet in-flight, I end up on the phone in the subway, even without a field, some underground.
The nostalgic had feared that the Kindle was yet another stunt by Amazon, that after you have destroyed the dear, old libraries, with their scent of paper, glue and bindings and committed many fine, would have caused the desertification of the books. Instead, our comrades of the days of school, folder or holdall, have reacted vigorously to the Kindle and have left back. According to the data from the Pew, 65% of american law books printed on paper, the 28% the ebook, the Kindle and no, the 4% audio-books. A die-hard 40% the law just by browsing page after page with the index, a futuristic 6% is strictly adhered to to ebooks snubbed the card. Similar data in Great Britain, the rest of the european market will follow. Pew observes that the educated public of the graduates prefer the paper, while those who do not have qualifications and feeds of the ebook and audio book.
in Short, the book has held and you can enjoy the twenty-first century manner. Yet the birthday of the Kindle, grandson of Amazon, it should be celebrated. Not only because it has put us in the pocket, the Universal Library, with thousands of free classics in all languages, allowing us to find the titles the lost years resent by the booksellers mouth-watering best-seller, but also because she finds, in the middle of the night, in an isolated place by the men, the two verses that lost only know how to give you courage to push through the darkest of nights.
