Eyes down

I must warn you of a new danger of technology, if you have not noticed it already. Kindles. Almost unbelievably, people walk around the streets of London reading them.

Yes, I know it is extraordinary. There were a few people who used to walk around reading books, but they were very few, and were probably known eccentrics.

And there is another constraint, which is that Kindles are still quite new. People have only just started openly reading them on the Tube. I remember my boss at the BBC in about 1989-90, who had a mobile phone (a brick) but refused to use it in public because of attitudes towards yuppies.

But I have recently seen two different people looking at e-readers while putting one foot in front of the other.

According to Google Images, it happens in New York (right). Doesn’t everything? But here?

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• ARealJournalist4

  Presumably the problem is that his own wretched book wasn’t worth porting to the Kindle.

  Is the Independent *seriously* unable to find a blogger with something more intelligent to say than Rent-a-tool?   I find this difficult to believe.

• Euan Armstrong

  They would be just as well giving it to the muggers.

• JohnJustice

  My, either you must really envy JR’s success or are really devastated by your own lack of success as a “real journalist”.

• 1232web

  The kindles are reasonably heavy as well. They weigh lot a more than a decent paperback. Are these people more of a problem than the people who walk around with an MP3 player blaring away. They are losing a different sense but can be a lot more intrusive.

• ARealJournalist4

  “JohnJustice” a.k.a. John Rent-a-tool: don’t you have anything more original to say?  Your posts are as uninspiring as your ridiculous blogs.

• porkfright

  Here come the Judge-yet, yet again.

• http://pulse.yahoo.com/_RWQW5VGWYSRA5K3VBT7ZWOEJLE Stephen

  Success?  Hmm… Mr Rentoul is blessed with an excellent platform from which to opine and report on the truely exciting times we are living through and yet, day after day, he fails to notice the key tropes, the Zeitgeist flies over his head, the larger issues of the day, such as the recent upsurge in the masses questioning the unaccountable elite, are completely ignored.  History is being made, things are changing, but Mr Rentoul wastes his time pettily railing against new phrases and expressions and, bizarrely, continues to go to embarrassing and unprofessional lengths to try to exonerate his hero, Blair, from any moral and legal responsibility for what he did to Iraq.  Rentoul’s trivial musings are chiefly notable for the reams of hostile responses they generate and as such, place him with the likes of Burchill; employed by the Inde to provoke and annoy.  There is a difference however, Burchill knew damn well her only job was to annoy whereas Rentoul actually imagines he’s providing some kind of insight into the world of politics.

• coventrian

  Is it ‘John’ as in ‘John’ Rentoul?

• http://profiles.google.com/roger.f.mccarthy Roger McCarthy

  As one of those few people who read books while walking (exercise and reading – what’s not to like?) and has done so for 40 years without once walking into a lamp-post or causing an accident I can see no issue at all with this.

  Having said that I did manage to fall down a long and very hard marble staircase at the House of Commons while reading a blackberry and have seen multiple other people fall or walk into things while using mobile phones so suspect that the smaller the object being read the more you focus on it and the less attention you pay to your surroundings.  

• Class Heroes

  I wonder which performs best in the rain. Paper or Kindle? Surely the Gadget Show or some such could do a much-needed test for us…