Updated Sunday, December 2, 2007 0:00 am TWN, By Meghan Daum, Special to the Los Angeles Times

Reading with readers won’t make our bookshelves bare

One of the many uses of air travel is the opportunity it provides to take a snapshot of the public’s reading tastes. Sure, best-seller lists rank what’s popular, but if you want to do more detailed market research — to know what kinds of people are reading what kinds of books, and how many pages into them they fall asleep — there is no better vantage point than the aisle of a jetliner. It is from there that my extremely scientific research has produced data suggesting the following: Readers of mass-market thrillers often wear Dockers and polo shirts bearing company logos; readers of books like “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” can often be found in business class or first class (it works, folks!); and, almost without exception, there will be a young person in the last row traveling with nothing but a knapsack and reading Camus for the explicit purpose of striking up a conversation with a sexually desirable fellow passenger.

Unfortunately, my airborne research methods are about to be thwarted. Recently, the online bookseller Amazon unveiled Kindle, a US$399 wireless, hand-held reading “device” that weighs just 10.3 ounces and uses a glare-free display screen called electronic paper. Kindle can hold as many as 200 books and allows users to download almost 90,000 titles, including magazines, newspapers and blogs. All of these can be accessed, for a price, within 60 seconds without having to sync up to a computer or subscribe to a wireless plan.

Electronic reading devices have a history of failure (Sony put out an e-book reader last year, and I doubt I’m the only one who never heard of it), but I’m willing to give Kindle the benefit of the doubt — and not just because the Amazon Web site features video testimonials from authors such as James Patterson talking about how it’s easier to use than a microwave oven. As someone whose livelihood is dependent on people reading, I’d be dumb to get too cranky about anything that facilitates the process.

But I can’t help getting churlish about the other thing Kindle will undoubtedly do: make it a lot harder to indulge in the crucial cultural task of judging books — and the people who read them — by their covers.

On the other hand, maybe we need Kindle more than we realize. It so happens that its appearance on the market coincides with the release of a National Endowment for the Arts report finding that Americans of all ages are reading both less frequently and less well than ever. And while there’s no telling whether a computerized widget is literacy’s last hope, I’d be remiss not to mention that in the time it took me to write this column, Amazon sold out of Kindles and placed them on back order.

Daum is an essayist and novelist in Los Angeles.

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