Kindle for Christmas?

The Guardian thinks this holiday season may be a turning point, a cultural shift, in regards to our reading habits.

From the intro...

How much have our perceptions of reading and writing changed now that you can craft a novel on a laptop and scroll through it on a Nintendo games console? This Christmas could be the moment when our idea of curling up with a fat novel are transformed for ever, says Tim Adams.

From the story...

Two unrelated observations about writing have snagged at my attention in the past couple of days and refused to go away. The first was a quote from Don DeLillo, the author of the great modern epic, Underworld. DeLillo was talking about how he continues to write on a typewriter, and suggested that: "I need the sound of the keys, the keys of a manual typewriter. The hammers striking the page. I like to see the words, the sentences, as they take shape. It's an aesthetic issue: when I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making."

The second was an advert in my local Argos for a "game" for the Nintendo DS console that features 100 classic books. The cartridge packaged itself as follows: "100 Classic Book Collection turns your Nintendo DS into a portable library containing must-read novels from iconic authors such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare and many more. Hold the DS like a book and use the touch screen to turn the pages. 100 Classic Book Collection allows various search methods such as searching for a book that suits your mood, or a specific requirement such as a short read." The soundtrack that can accompany the reading of these classics includes the canned effect of a crackling log fire.

Somewhere in between these two observations there seemed to be a disconnect, a kind of paradox, but it took me a while to work out where it lay.