Essentially what the crowd and the speakers agreed on was that there is something negated from the reading experience when you move from a book, which is singularly dedicated to the content at hand, to an electronic device, a more promiscuous format for lack of a better term.  Think for example – as Hornby did – of the difference in experience between playing a record and selecting an album to play on an iPod.

Even as a Kindle user, I’ll be the first to agree that consuming content on a Kindle is a much different experience than from reading an actual physical book.  In my mind, carrying a book around is the last stand for analog content; I long ago came to think of music and movies as files or folders, but until recently I had never thought that way about books.  In a discussion led by Eggers, the founder of an imprint that publishes some of the world’s most physically beautiful books, there is bound to be some bias towards the aesthetic experience of buying, holding and reading a book.

The most striking thing about the Kindle Bestseller list about it is its utter dominance by serial fiction – the stuff you find in supermarkets by popular authors like Janet Evanovich, Richard North Patterson and so forth, plus right-wing screeds by the likes of Glenn Beck and cohorts.  What the [ahem] cultural elites fail to understand about these books – the actual physical books – is that they are produced to be the very worst of aesthetic experiences in publishing: poorly bound, grey-papered budget paperbacks.  For devotees of these kinds of books, the Kindle actually represents an enormous step up from what they’re given today.  It’s not for nothing that Goodwills and St Vincent De Pauls are piled high with mass-market paperbacks selling for a dime each.  Nobody wants these when they’re done and there’s no meaningful secondary market.  They’re consumed and then they’re trash.

So when a San Francisco crowd starts booing a delivery device for popular fiction because it’s some kind of lowering of their standard of what a book should be, I can’t help but compare it to the same ‘cultural elitism’ that makes it impossible for them to understand the appeal of a George Bush, Fox News, or any mysteriously popular icon of so-called Red State America. E-readers are the most democratic of devices, moving the words and ideas in books out of their hallowed packaging and leveling them for all readers.  As Hornby himself discussed, there’s nothing wrong with having books be easy to read and fun for all; it’s the very cornerstone of his considerable success both as novelist and frequent Hollywood adaptee.

There will always be a market for books so long as people crave them as a key aesthetic element of their reading experience. Boutique houses like McSweeney’s may be well prepared where publishing is going: beautiful editions for those who need that experience, just as there continues to be a market for vinyl records for a certain kind of collector.  But “Democracy In America,” the kind you find in supermarkets, will increasingly go electronic.  Deal with it.

One big surprise right off the bat is the loss of Amazon’s Recommendations engine. My Kindle account is linked to my main account, where I have literally ten years of purchase and browse history stored.  My Kindle recommendations appear on the Kindle Store home page, as can be seen in the picture at right.  At best, I would regard these as ‘generic’ recommendations that have little to do with what I’ve ordered either in the past or over the Kindle. I also have 25 books stored in my “Save For Later” tab as well as a number of samples I’ve ordered.  Many of these are books about media & marketing, yet not one single business book recommendation.  Clearly these aren’t playing into the recommendation intelligence.

The Kindle Top Sellers proves to be pretty much useless as well as a discovery engine.  As you can see in the screen shot, the Top Sellers are a pretty weird bunch with little relation to today’s accepted Bestseller lists like those in the USA Today or New York Times.  What’s going on here?  With the exception of the Glenn Beck book, all of these are free.  While this certainly shows the power of price elasticity in the store (and again supports Chris Anderson’s Free, dammit), it also supports my earlier point: if you make it fun & easy to shop, people will buy books in droves – even titles they might not want that much. Sherlock Holmes making the Kindle Top Sellers list shows that people will ‘buy’ pretty much anything if it’s free.  At minimum, you’d hope that Amazon could separate out backlist or classics from the true contemporary bestsellers.

This goes to show an easy fix that should go on each line – there’s no easy access to price information! I have to open a link to each book to find out what I’m going to pay.  While the Kindle is advertised as having most books at $9.99, I can tell you after a few months of ownership that most of the books I’ve been interested in – many of which are true Bestsellers – are not $9.99.  I’d be curious to see a price distribution graph if anyone’s done the work.

The Sample Chapters program is half-baked. Their easy availability ois a great idea but in practice gives unsatisfactory results with no apparent rational oversight of content selection.  On Amazon proper, you can select a “random page” in most books just as you would in a bookstore; when you pick up a physical book to browse it, you naturally open to the middle not the Foreword.   All of the Sample Chapters I’ve received have been just the Forewords, not the ‘guts’ of the book, which is what I’m really interested in.  Worse, in many cases half or more of the sample is just the credits at the front of the book!

Finally there’s no linking from reviews and other sources, a longtime basic function of hyperlinking which Amazon supports with its open affiliates program.  Every Sunday I read the New York Times Book Review in search of ideas for things to read.  You’d think that the NYT on Kindle could at least have links into the store.  Even if that’s not feasible, there could at least be a menu on the home page (or even within) for “Recently Reviewed” by newspaper or magazine.  Instead I’m left to search, with each click making it a little less likely that I’ll make a purchase.  And then of course there’s the issue – key for all E-books – of whether all books will even be available when they’re reviewed.

All of these are solvable problems.  If even one of these can be fixed, I predict a huge increase in the vitality of the Kindle.  One wonders if these will be better addressed in the upcoming competitive devices from PlasticLogic and others – and if Amazon’s strength online will be an Achilles heel for its E-books business.