Last year about this time, Amazon France started marketing the Kindle as the gift for Christmas. Sounds crazy if you're from the US.
In the last twelve months, with the daily bus and metro transits in Paris, I have seen one kindle in the hands of an absorbed reader. And he was in the park. Maybe the scarcity is due to those signs warning you about the snatch-and-hop-off-the-bus telephone thefts, but I doubt it. The French are fossils when it comes to tradition, just look at the hand-me down clothes some of their children wear. Washed to stone rigidity high-waters so high they might be shorts. This is not a bad thing, really.
But how can Amazon imagine to fill the hands of 60 million people with e-readers? There's got to be another kind of revolution before that happens. One of the big criticsims was the hefty prices of e-books, another was the limited selection.
I've heard people criticizing the new genres coming from the US and the whole idea of twenty year old kids making a career as fiction writers. Someone even said to me they thought it was ludicrous that I might write a memoir, I was too young. Tradition reigns.
Maybe I am on the wrong bus and metro lines, perhaps the line 1 to La Defense is where I can scout for e-readers. I've asked lots of book people if they have a kindle, most of them say,"What?"
But today I saw a man on the bus reading on his smartphone.
In the last twelve months, with the daily bus and metro transits in Paris, I have seen one kindle in the hands of an absorbed reader. And he was in the park. Maybe the scarcity is due to those signs warning you about the snatch-and-hop-off-the-bus telephone thefts, but I doubt it. The French are fossils when it comes to tradition, just look at the hand-me down clothes some of their children wear. Washed to stone rigidity high-waters so high they might be shorts. This is not a bad thing, really.
But how can Amazon imagine to fill the hands of 60 million people with e-readers? There's got to be another kind of revolution before that happens. One of the big criticsims was the hefty prices of e-books, another was the limited selection.
I've heard people criticizing the new genres coming from the US and the whole idea of twenty year old kids making a career as fiction writers. Someone even said to me they thought it was ludicrous that I might write a memoir, I was too young. Tradition reigns.
Maybe I am on the wrong bus and metro lines, perhaps the line 1 to La Defense is where I can scout for e-readers. I've asked lots of book people if they have a kindle, most of them say,"What?"
But today I saw a man on the bus reading on his smartphone.
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