This morning, I set my laptop computer and my Kindle down, one on top of the other, on what I thought was a sturdy tabletop, where they stayed for a minute or so before crashing to the floor. The Kindle is totaled, and the laptop hard drive is definitely wonky.
So I called Amazon, which will deliver me a replacement Kindle by this morning (approximately 20 hours after my call) at a heavily discounted price, even though my warranty was expired, and I called Dell (where I do have a warranty) to confirm that the hard drive was the probable locus of my laptop problems. Dell thought it surely was, and offered to have a technician on my doorstep this morning, but I preferred to pop in one of the three clones that I update once a week or so and keep in three separate locations. My computer’s working fine, and I’m using it to read my Kindle books while I wait for the new Kindle to arrive (which will probably be before you read this).
Sometimes the modern world works really really well.
Not bad, but still more hassle and expense than if your book had dropped to the floor.
However, to have as many books as could be in the kindle, the weight would be likely to make even a very sturdy table collapse.
(by the way – how heavily discounted?)
The other day my old fashioned book fell on the floor. I just picked it up and kept on reading it. Then the wind blew the paper I was writing on into the garden. I just fetched it and kept on writing. THESE are the good old days.
Okay, I’ll concede you the Kindle. The laptop solution owes far
less to the modern world than to your forethought and preparedness.
Your backup regimen is the kind of thing that everybody should use
and very few people actually do.
The typical person with a hard disk problem would be in a panic.
After all, it contains unique data that has never been backed up.
The idea that the hard disk may fail, or may die at an inopportune
time seems to be an uncommon realization.
I’ve seen a number of otherwise-astute people who ended up spending
big bucks on a disk-recovery service because they didn’t spend
little bucks (plus forethought and a little time) on backups.
@Ron: Ah but “the modern world” has made availbale to Steve choices like his backup regimen.
As a luddite in the world of electronic books, I have to admit there is a certain appeal. I have a few thousand books in my home, and my wife often complains about how they have taken over (shelves on every wall, stacks in the corners of our bedroom). The thought of having them all neatly stored on some electronic medium is appealing – but not appealing enough, I have to say.
It truly is. And don’t forget price discrimination. There’s a parallel system operating, serving those with less moolah and/or rectitude.
Last night I set my Pandigital Novel that cost 60 bucks on clearance at Kohls on the shelf next to my Sony reader that was 70 bucks on clearance at Target. The Pandigital has been upgraded from a borderline reader into a poor man’s iPad thru a collection of hacks and firmwares available free from the site Slatedroid, created by a bunch of programmers and hobbyists we determined to see how far they could push the device. A lot of work, ingenuity and brainpower put to work just to see if they could do it. No money expected in return.
And on the two devices reside approximately 350 books in a variety of formats from scanned PDFs of text books to Kindle titles stripped of their DRM and sent to me by kind souls I will never meet. No money exchanged, just the expectation that they will also be able to get what they are looking for.
So for a little over 100 bucks I have a couple decades’ worth of reading (and it floods in much faster than I can consume it). Should I drop either device, I might have to pick up a Literati on clearance at Bed Bath and Beyond for 40 bucks or a Jetbook lite for 80 on Newegg. The important thing of course is the books, not the machines, which also sit on my hard drive, a memory stick, and of course out there in the cloud waiting to be plucked again.
This reminded me of an article I read by Max Barry, an Australian author, on the future of the publishing industry. I couldn’t find it, but here’s an equally relevant article by him on a similar topic : http://www.maxbarry.com/2010/03/04/news.html
How far did the Kindle fall? A tabletop makes it sound like no more than 3 or 4 feet. Did something fall on top of it?
I had previously hoped that the Kindle was designed to survive that sort of fall. I guess the Kindle looks tougher than it actually is.
Ice9: I’ve dropped my Kindle a gazillion times with no damage. This time, it fell four feet — and my laptop fell the same four feet, and landed on the Kindle.