Nicholson Baker On What’s Wrong With His Kindle

It’s not only that the screen is a “four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon.” Nor is it merely the “grim and Calvinist” font, or that the text-to-speech feature bats less than a thousand. There’s also a lot missing from the library: “I spent an hour standing in front of some fiction bookcases, checking on titles. There is no Amazon Kindle version of ‘The Jewel in the Crown.’ There’s no Kindle of Jean Stafford, no Vladimir Nabokov, no ‘Flaubert’s Parrot,’ no ‘Remains of the Day’….”