Imagine this: you’re at the mall, ready to make your last stop of the day. You’re walking toward any random bookseller - Borders or Barnes and Noble - to browse around, grab a chair and peruse your finds, enveloped in the sweet scents of coffees brewing in the café and the sounds of fellow readers flipping through glossy magazine pages. Now imagine the mall bookstores of the future: same old chairs, same old cafés, same old customers… but the shelves are filled with strange, white plastic devices. Bizarre, yes? Well, recently, Amazon.com introduced a new device that’s supposed to revolutionize the way we read. Yes, it’s portable. Yes, it’s white. Yes, it has a screen. Yes, you can pay to download stuff… and no, it’s not an iPod. Amazon has created the Kindle, a device formulated to drastically alter the way we read. Supposedly, the Kindle’s revolutionary technology will take the world by storm and make books, our paper friends, completely obsolete, a la VHS vs. DVD. I beg to differ – not only does the bad outweigh the good, but there’s nothing like cracking open a brand new book and inhaling the smell. Crack your Kindle wide open and you’re out $400.

For all of the negatives, there are some interesting positive aspects to the Kindle. One neat thing is the new screen technology, E Ink. E Ink is made of negatively and positively charged black and white particles that move to form text on the screen. However, once you finish reading one page and want to go on to the next, you have to wait for the E Ink particles to reform into words. The screen itself is more reminiscent of paper versus an LCD screen – no flickering and no reflections. However, the rest of the Kindle’s design is less than handy. The “next page” button is “conveniently” located on the side of the device so whenever you pick it up, the page changes, and the keyboard’s tiny keys look incredibly awkward to use.

Price is another factor. The Kindle alone costs $400, and individual books cost $10 each - a real bargain, Amazon says, considering that hardbacks cost two to three times more. However, what they fail to realize is the fact that readers can visit a used book store and come home with armfuls of good, tangible books, both paperback and hardcover, for under a few bucks. Quality versus quantity isn’t a problem in said situation.

When it comes down to it, the Kindle is a neat new technology, but it’s incredibly doubtful that it will be replacing the book as the preferred media for a long time. Serious readers want paper books, not plastic – the ones you can hold in your hand and display on your shelves - and fans of portable devices are probably too busy toying with their iPod Touches and texting on their flip phones to care. So, Amazon’s missed its target audience on both counts. But it is amusing to imagine a future where the Kindle has made books completely obsolete…just try to picture the CHS Media Center with its numerous shelves, full of white plastic Kindles.