Kleine Kindle-ech

I’ve been under the weather the last few days and even with the Martin Luther King holiday have missed almost two days of work. A hacking cough has made long stretches of sleep hard to come by and an occasional fever has made life seem like an Edgar Allan Poe story – not quite sure of what is real and what not.

Yesterday I got my Kindle – just in time for the trip to ELI. I’ll have it there if anyone wants to take a look. It needs to be charged before use. So I plugged it in and left it till the morning. I got up around 4 – cough, remember? Took some pills, futzed a little online and then looked at the Kindle. What I was looking at proved to be a screen saver of some sort. It was the picture of a face plate of a book or so it seemed, with the image of a very weird looking person, and for a while I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Then I started into the instructions on how to use the thing, didn’t get far and was onto something else.

One of the Quotes of the Day on my iGoogle page today was this very weird one.

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.
- Oscar Wilde

I found this disturbing and for some macabre reason went to do a search on Oscar Wilde. I read this Wikipedia entry when all of a sudden I realized from the picture there that is was Wilde in that picture in Kindle. Perhaps all this shows is my remarkable ignorance of what the various literary icons look like. I wouldn’t recognize anyone of them, unless they made it onto TV shows like Dick Cavett. But it seemed at the time like there was a great synch coming from a place yet unknown, another little bit of fascination with this technology.

All of this is to say that I will use the trip to and from ELI to get a sense of the thing and then write a post about it next week or the week after that. There is some discussion about it at the ACRLlog, but I believe much of that is about how Librarians might or might not use it themselves rather than on whether it will catch on among the masses. (Or, for example, what if the faculty used them but students not.)