Things the Amazon Kindle is Not Good For

After not caring about the Kindle for so long I am kind of rooting for it now. Maybe working here is getting to me. Maybe I heard about Apple releasing their on kindle thing and decided they were jackasses and hoped they would get crushed, or at least fairly beaten by, the kindle. So if you are going to buy one of these book readers (I'm not) you should buy a kindle. And if you buy a book reader thats not a Kindle, definitely don't buy the one from Apple. I'd actually like to see Apple lose more than Amazon win. Even if Microsoft released some crappy electronic book reader that blue screened when you looked at it, and saturated the market with it, causing damage that would cause decades for the industry to recover from, I would still be happy because at least Apple lost that round.

Anyway, since I am now some kind of fan for this device I would never buy, and since I have to sit around at work for like an hour waiting for rush hour to go away, I thought I would write down a list of things the Kindle is not good for:

1. Giving yourself a papercut. No paper :(

2. Using as a surprisingly noisy projectile weapon. Books can be tossed about and thrown out the window without breaking them. And when you throw hardbacks, they usually open up and make a sound. Thats pretty cool. Also, watch this movie.

3. Burning for heat. Its electronic, so you can't pile up a bunch of kindles and light them on fire for warmth because the toxic gasses will probably kill you.

4. Blending into the background. A guy sitting around reading a book isn't that notable. But a guy sitting around staring at futuristic and expensive looking white box will get noticed.

5. Levitating. Admittedly, books can't do this either.

6. Smelling like a book. New books have that paper smell. Sometimes its fun. The Kindle doesn't do that.

7. Going on a long journey with a light source by no power. Imagine if you were on an interstellar space ship that had light but no gravity, electrical outlets, or batteries. You could take books and read them over and over again for the rest of your life (traveling between stars takes a looooong time) but the Kindle would run out of batteries. I suppose another use case is if you were descending deep into subterranean dungeons to fight monsters from hell--a book can be read (or burned) by torchlight, but down there, there is no way to recharge your Kindle. And with your luck they wouldn't even release dungeon maps for the Kindle anyway.

8. Giving away. When you read a physical book, when you're done with it, you can give it to a friend. The MPAA and RIAA call this piracy, but they suck so screw them. With the Kindle, there could be some sharing mechanism for our ebooks, but lets face it. It probably sucks.

9. Balancing objects such as tables and slide projectors. Many books of varying sizes can be placed under the legs of tables and projectors to balance them without being harmed. If you do that with a Kindle though, I think it will damage the screen.

10. Playing the boardgame Clue (a.k.a. Master Detective). My family uses thin hardback books to shield their clue sheets from prying eyes. The Kindle wouldn't work for this.

11. Slamming down on the table to make a noise. The Kindle is too light to make a respectable boom sound, and would likely be damaged in the process.

12. Using as a secret stash for illegal software or candy or whatever. For an example, see one of the best movies of all time. You have to like cut holes in lots of pages and glue the ends together.

13. Ripping pages out. Sometimes people just gotta rip a page out of a book and take it away, leaving the book deformed and less useful. You can't do that with a Kindle. You can't even approximate the action.

14. Drawing notes on the margins. If you draw on the margins of the kindle, you're really drawing on the screen, so you can only make one set of notes or juvenile doodles for all books, for all time, whereas in a book you get a set per page!

15. In an emergency, every page of a book can be ripped out and folded into a paper airplane. This is not possible with the Kindle.

16. Props for being a douchebag: you can line up books on a shelf to make people think your smart (Advanced Calculus, The Lord of the Rings, Programming Concepts) or nerdy (your set of retarded, overpriced D&D manuals). You can't do that with a Kindle, and if you found a way, it would be way less subtle than a shelf full of books you've never read.

17. Conversation pieces. Sure, you can sit down on a bus with a Kindle and hope that someone asks "what are you reading?" instead of "WTF is that?" but with a book, a stranger might invade your space and twist their head to see the title of the book without talking to you. The kindle doesn't give them the chance to do that.

18. Cluttering up your office. If you were trying to discourage people from sitting on your couch and talking to you, ebooks will not help. And you can't leave your expensive Kindle lying there. Unless your ***** of an ex-girlfriend bought it for you a week before dumping you and you want it to be stolen.

19. Giving yourself a present you already owned just to screw with people, like House did. You can't wrap an ebook up in brown paper and throw on a mysterious card. And people would already know you have a Kindle, so thats out.

20. You can't sell an ebook on your company's internal mailing list for selling stuff and have people race to your desk to buy it.