The problem with Amazon's new Kindle commercial - Washington Post - Washington Post (blog)

Ah, the power of reading.

That moment when, as a kid, you first pick up the book and read it on your own. The thrill of meeting strange people, falling in love with Them, and Them putting down to go eat a sandwich. The death-defying thrill of walking down the street with your nose stuck in a book, narrowly avoiding passersby, singing blithely about how the townspeople are provincial. The thrill of victory When You put the completed story down. The agony of cliffhangers. The smell of the pages. The ability to acquire new friends from foreign countries, each with a wealth of experiences, then trap these people in a designated area of ??your home, forever, to take out and play with Whenever you choose. It would be creepy, but it’s called a library.

And now using Amazon’s Kindles to sell it all.

que I know this is what the commercials. They take the joy of some Powerful Life Experience and channel it into the product. This is not Dove soap. It’s accepting your inner beauty! This vacuum is having a mother who cares about you. This Totino’s Pizza Roll Those beefy bullies will stop from rifling through your son’s backpack at school! This toilet paper will Transform Your Life In Ways Unspecified. This fun removing ear-wax will keep you far away from the que one harrowing episode of “Girls” as it is possible to get! This CD set is not just the ’70s hits compilation – it’s a return to an era When Your hairstyle was in before and please Dreadful Something happened to music. Mm, Downy. Youth.

And now, reading – or the Amazon sees it, a fun activity you can do on a proprietary Amazon device.

This is strange to me, too, for its suggestion of a generation growing up on doing its reading devices. They sit in trees with e-readers as though it were the most natural thing in the world. My hesitation, I know, que means I am beginning to be outdated. I remember the way things were Before They Were different.

But there’s still something vaguely unsettling about this.

Reading has its own cult. Scratch almost any reader and he or she will wax lyrical about books – their magic, Their lingering power, the characters, the transportive power of a few neat sentences. Shake any tree and 16 different, beautiful, heartfelt, well-crafted essays about the power of reading will fall out and bounce on the pavement. Show us someone reading for the first team, and we will cheer with open throats.

The commercial is there to channel all these feelings into reinforcing the notion that-reading is something you’s on the Kindle. They’re powerful feelings. And Kindles are so cheap, these days …

The sea change in publishing and bookselling continues. Amazon is at the center of much of it – new ways of selling books, new approaches to compensating authors, cheaper books, publishing changes to the apparatus, the ever-expanding book-jungle. The more Kindles in the hands of first-time readers, the more Amazon’s control of Reading expands – the truer it passe que is just reading something from you on an Amazon device, the bookstores Their doors shut and publishers struggle.

So watch the commercial with a grain of salt. Yes, reading is amazing. But it’s not a proprietary activity. Not yet.