The joys of E at 30,000 feet
Evan Schnittman, over at Oxford University Press, is an old-time print guy, but he’s been warming up to his Kindle, especially at 30,000 feet.
On a recent jet flight, Evan and his seatmate both started Iwan McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and, after five hours, had read it “cover to cover (in her case), lines 1 - 1565 (in my case). We settled back and compared notes on the grace of McEwan’s language and the depth of repression in the main characters, and then we went back to our own worlds.
“With three long and boring hours of flying to go, I re-opened my Kindle and began reading. Soon I finished the Times, the Journal, and 3 articles in Slate. I was also able to finish the last part of Steve Martin’s memoir Born Standing Up, and started Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. All this time my plane-mate, out of reading material, struggled desperately to entertain herself by leafing through the SkyMall catalogue and pondering the price of a life-sized mechanical swimming pool dolphin (I couldn’t make that up if I tried) while waiting for the movies on Continental Airlines antiquated entertainment system to cycle back to the beginning.
“This is where e-books have a distinct and very important advantage over print, portability. E-books’ greatest potential audience is the traveler.
Those who commute using public transportation and those who are passengers for hours on end in planes, trains and automobiles are the true growth audience for ebooks. Ebooks are about convenience and are what I read when it’s impractical to read in print. When I am commuting or traveling I use my Kindle. The rest of the time I read in print.”
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