Well I have just started using my Kindle, which I was lucky enough to receive over the summer break. It is quite an amazing device – perhaps its most remarkable quality is that it literally uses what is known as 'electronic ink' (I think). As far as I can tell, this is real ink that is electronically dispersed across the screen. Any IT geeks that want to correct this explanation, go right ahead. Anyway, this technology affords the Kindle a look and feel that is quite radically different to anything you’ve ever seen (eg, no glare or pixilation), and enables it to offer a very good approximation to a real book, which is the bottleneck manufacturers had historically found hard to overcome.
The Kindle is an excellent conduit for all manner of difficult-to-access media. In addition to being able to store 1,500 books in one device, which can be downloaded wirelessly from anywhere in the world in around 60 seconds, you can subscribe to newspapers and magazines. So I am currently getting The Economist, which I had actually stopped reading, Salon and Fortune all delivered electronically. And it gets better – as far as I can determine, it is cheaper for me to download mags to my Kindle that to, say, subscribe to Fortune in hardcopy. Subject to being able to acquire the books I want, I cannot imagine frequenting many bookstores again. I find reading on the Kindle easier than a traditional book. For example, the text is larger, it is more portable than a book, it remembers the last page I read, and I can seamlessly access the embedded dictionary whenever I please. One current drawback is that while the overseas newspaper selection is excellent, the Australian options are non-existent. This could be the perfect channel for Fairfax, News Ltd, or indeed, Business Spectator, to deliver their content. Hurry up guys!
While on the subject of reading matter, I emerged from the break concurrently engrossed in quite a number of books, which is a rather nasty habit to get into. I started in fine form, quickly knocking over The Philosopher and the Wolf by Mark Rowlands, Tom Perkins' The Valley Boy, which is outstanding, and a requisite piece of high-end spy fiction by Vince Flynn. (For those who don't know, Tom Perkins is the founder of the leading venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, and something of a polymath. I would recommend Valley Boy highly to the private equity folks.)
I have, however, found myself hitting a quagmire of sorts with the remaining texts. And so, I have only ‘partly processed’ Paul Kelly's The March of Patriots, which is good but slow-going, Skildelsky's recap of Keynes, which is shaping up pretty well (the opening sections on the GFC are a bore but there are few better than Skildesky when it he comes to Keynes himself), Andrew Agassi's surprisingly frank Open, which I just finished last night (interesting albeit at times irritating; while Agassi attempts to project himself as a misunderstood thinker, he actually ends up coming across as not much more than a narcissistic tennis player), Pamela Robson's Best Australian Speeches, El-Erain's When Markets Collide, and Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance. As always, the challenge will be to actually finish these books. This is easier said than done – I find that once I slip back into work mode it is very hard to disengage from my professional obligations. I also find that if a book is really thought-provoking, it can be counterproductive as one gets awfully distracted by the ideas it stimulates! And so there can, frustratingly, be a negative relation between how inspiring a text is and the time that it takes to complete.
