Off-Topic: Warren Ellis on the Kindle
Being a writer and a bookseller, I’m keenly interested in the evolution of e-books, seeing as how it directly affects my livelihood. Which is why this piece by comic writer god Warren Ellis (where’s the second Fell graphic novel, Warren?) made me laugh. And think, just a little.
Warren Ellis does not really like the Amazon Kindle, or the i-Phone, or the Sony Whatever.
Enter the iPhone, that vile, characterless slab of 1980s Star Trek plastic banality from the Bay Area Federation. Bad enough that everyone I know in tech/design circles swaggers around with one jammed in their pocket, like they’re getting cyber-frottage from a magic wand. “Look,” they whisper to me, holding it up as carefully as if it were some elf they’d found close to death in an enchanted forest and had nursed back to health. “It even makes phone calls!”
He does feel that we booksellers are overreacting (I think he’s right).
They fear the Kindle like it was the breath of the devil’s cock on their shoulder – despite the fact that Mr Bezos’s clever little board has probably not sold a million units yet. Because, as any American bookseller will shriek at you while gouging their own forearms open with Stanley knives, only 34 Americans actually buy and read books. As far as they’re concerned, the Kindle emerged directly from Satan’s mangina and will doom them all.
I have in fact felt the breath of the devil’s cock on my shoulder before, but it wasn’t from the Kindle- it was this creepy dude that used to come into my old store with long, ratty hair and a Confederate Army cap, and sit for hours perusing the children’s books, and after he left one of my co-workers would invariably find some children’s books in the bathroom, usually the ones about how My Body is Private.
But, Warren Ellis figures, an audience is an audience not matter how they are reading your stuff. At least they’re paying for it. I only wish I had an audience. Too bad I hate Twitter.
Sure, 300,000 Twitter followers isn’t the same as an umpty-million TV audience, but those 300K people are highly selective neophiles with disposable income. They have bloody iPhones and everything. At some point, he’ll recommend a prose book and the number of people tapping their way to Amazon for a one-click-and-back-to-their-Kindle-app is going to be eminently trackable. That may very well tell an interesting story.
Here’s how lame I am: I actually found someone’s lost iPhone in the store the other day, and I didn’t know what it was. I figured it was some kind of handheld thingy so I tried to turn it on to find out the owner’s contact information.
I couldn’t figure out how to turn it on. 
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