LiveBlogging the Kindle Again

My Kindle greeted me this morning with a message of congratulations on being an early adopter. My heart sank. The last thing I want to be is an early adopter of anything--high prices, exponential inconvenience. Indeed, that's why I waited a year. But an early adopter I am and I know (or at least I hope) the inconveniences I am experiencing are not those that will be suffered by those who come later. Here are a few notes:

• It's terrified of water. No, I am terrified of water in proximity to the kindle. I am a clumsy ox: I daily spilll coffee, fruit juice, fizzy water, and would cheerfully spill house paint or battery acid if I had the chance. I trashed one laptop last year with a glass of champagne (it was old). I think Kindle is still a bit on the pricey side, and I'd be pretty glum if I had to buy a new one before I had amortized the old. I don't leave it on the bedside table with a water glass. I'm skittish about taking it out next to coffee. I wouldn't even think of taking it in the shower--oh wait, I don't do that with paper books either.
  

• Keeping track of what's important can be a nuisance. Note-taking is clumsy and inconvenient. "Clipping" is clumsy and inconvenient. Worst, I can think of any way tdo export these notes: if they want a serious academic audience, they are just going to have to figure out some way to team up with Evernote, or Zotero, or somesuch. Oh, and by the way, how do you cite it? You don't get page numbers; you get line numbers, which vary as a function of the selected type size. I assume there is a committee at work on this one somewhere.

• Oh, and footnotes. They promised footnotes. Right now, my Kindle book is Peter L. Bernstein, Capital Ideas Evolving. It has two sets of footnotes: "asterisks" and numbers. Kindle does give links to the asterisks but not to the numbers. I suspect this may just be an operational error (the kind of thing you live with if you are an early adopter?). But if they intend to make it a practice, that's another reason why it will be useless for scholarly work.

Bottom line: I still like it, pretty much. I seem to be using it a lot. It's convenient on the exercycle and in bed. It pops easily into the backpack, although I must be careful to keep it where it won't get rained on, and I'm still carrying a backup book for places where I can't use it. But as the fella says, times change and we must change anon. Or was it anon who said that? More later.