The charity and fundraising foughts of Ian Atkinson


Tuesday 11 January 2011

The Future's Bright. The Future's Black And White.



My girlfriend got me a Kindle for Christmas. Although I’m not sure she knows what it’s for, since she also bought me a stack of paperbacks.


But the Kindle is great – as everyone everywhere has already pointed out, it’s not like reading on a traditional, backlit screen. But it’s not like reading a book either. In some ways, it’s nicer.


You don’t have to hold it open against a protesting, perfect-bound spine. You don’t need to remember your page number or fold over a corner (in fact I believe they recommend not folding the corner of your Kindle over). And you can increase the typesize at the touch of a button.


But the reasons I wanted a Kindle were benefits they don’t even advertise.


After all, the TV ad for the Kindle is of a girl reading hers on some exotic, sun-kissed beach. I’m about to become a dad for the first time – it’ll be years before I see another exotic beach.


No, I wanted a Kindle because of an utterly self-centred benefit that occurred to me:


I’ll never have to lend anyone a book ever again!


Actually I don’t mind lending people books. I’d just like them back. Which often doesn’t happen.


I must have lost dozens of books that way. And you can either go through the social embarrassment of every so often wimpily saying, “So… how are you getting on with that book I lent you… eight years ago?” Or you can just not mention it at all, and just think of that person as A GODDAMN THIEF WHO STOLE YOUR PROPERTY.


Anyway. There was a second, related benefit I wanted a Kindle for. Not to read novels on (again, as they do in the ads). But instead, to store all of my reference books on. All my non-fiction books on fundraising, advertising, marketing, creativity, writing, design etc etc. It struck me that having all that reference material brought together on something weighing less than a paperback would be A Good Thing.


While I’m doing Amazon’s job for them, there are three more handy benefits they don’t shout about.


1. You can lend books with it. You can send your electronic copy from your Kindle to someone else’s, for 14 days. Then it comes back to you, without you ever having to drop unsubtle hints about getting it back.


2. You can email documents to your Kindle to read them. Really handy when you don’t want to be fighting with six different confidential printouts on a train.


3. You can surf the internet on it. Ok, it’s not in colour, but it’s still handy – yet it doesn’t feature in Amazon’s ads, and it’s accessed from a folder called ‘Experimental’. But I lay in bed on Boxing Day following the Guardian Online’s coverage of the fourth Ashes test from my Kindle and it was great. (It helped that we marmalised them, obviously.)


So. As I’ve clearly proved: modern advertising is rubbish. If charities conveyed the need and solution of their cause as weakly as those ads promote the Kindle, they’d never raise a penny.


And no wonder that when I log onto Amazon the homepage says, “Thank you for making Kindle number one.” They should be thanking me. I had to discover half the benefits for myself.