Kids and Kindle
My wife is only days away from receiving her exciting new new-to-her Kindle, which is to say that I expect soon to get my hands on a Kindle 2. Meanwhile this note from a good friend about the machine's effect in his household:
An (unreported?) Kindle phenomenon: 11-year old girl, drove parents crazy by not reading books because totally addicted to electronics, has now transferred total addiction to Kindle 2 - and now does nothing, ever, but read books, one after another. In bed, in the car, while eating - while crossing streets!
[My wife] says, "Let's buy Amazon stock. In six months, the world will have discovered this particular phenomenon." (She is the one who had the sudden insight that this might work for [our daughter].)
Ah, this explains the trajectory of my financial life. On hearing the story, my first instinct was not, "Hey, let's act on the potential market-moving nature of this news" but rather "Hey, maybe this is a new answer to all those old laments about American kids refusing to read." Either way, good news for Amazon, good news for the family in question -- and not even bad news for those who have most reason to fear the coming of Kindle, book-store owners, since it sounds as if this new enthusiast was not spending that much time in book stores anyway.
About the Author
James Fallows is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and author of the newsletter Breaking the News.