The Limits Of Kindling

Nicholson Baker is not a big e-Book fan:

Yes, you can save nine dollars if you buy the Kindle edition of “The Algorithmic Beauty of Seaweeds, Sponges, and Corals,” by Jaap A. Kaandorp, et al.it’ll cost you $85.40 delivered wirelessly, versus $94.89 in print. New Scientist says that Kaandorp’s book is “beautifully, if sometimes eccentrically, illustrated with photographs, drawings and computer simulations.” The illustrations are there in the Kindle version, but they’re exceedingly hard to make out, even if you zoom in on them using the five-way clicker switch, or “control nipple,” as one Kindler called it. An award-winning medical textbook titled “Imaging in Oncology” (second edition) is for sale in the Kindle Store for $287.96. Tables are garbled. The color codingyellow for malignancy, blue for healthy tissuehas been lost. Arrows pointing to shadowy tumors become invisible in the gray. Indeed, the tumors themselves disappear.