If we don’t make readable and attractive books, we give readers one less reason to look for physical, printed books and periodicals. I understand some of the attraction of Kindle and like electronic readers, but they don’t give one the pleasure of cracking open a stiff, new book with its nw book smell.

That said, to remain relevant, I think we book designers do need to learn to design for Kindle. Making e-books attractive will be challenging and that should be worth something, as well as fun to do.

Kimberly — The Kindle 2 *is* usable by a blind reader, and of course that statement comes with caveats. The way you would use it would be to utilize the text-to-speech functionality. You get a clunky, robotic voice reading in about real time. The bigger problem is that many publishers and authors, spurred on by what they perceived to be an assault on their audio/performance rights, have disabled the text-to-speech functionality on their books (Random House being one who cites this proudly!). So what might have been a useful, if imperfect, feature has been rendered largely useless by the publishing industry.

I think it’s too bad because it would have opened the door to more books at more affordable prices, despite the lack of compelling experience (though, if embraced by the vision impaired constituency, Amazon might have been inspired to improve the experience.

I have been an ebook consumer since the very early days and a voracious reader since childhood. The idea that, with a kindle or other device, I could have access to the same books as everyone else is simply beyond my wildest reading fantasies.

Talk about limiting the audience! I’m not sure how many years of whining it will take before I’ll obtain one of the (still mythical) Apple tablets!

Yes, when I first saw the way they were doing things, I couldn’t understand why.

Then I thought about why they would do that.

It’s obvious: It was built from the start for a larger screen. Just think of how great that’ll be on an iTablet! No more vertical scrolling.

The same digital advances that allow e-books also allow e-audiobooks, and many writers (and their readers) are taking advantage of it through podcasting or other means.