亞馬遜Kindle Voyage 紙質書的生存危機

Amazon’s Kindle is a tech-industry miracle. That sounds over-the-top; it’s not.

亞馬遜(Amazon)的Kindle是科技行業的一個奇蹟。這話聽起來很誇張，其實不然。

In 2007, when the company first unveiled its e-reader, the device was an expensive ugly duckling whose future looked marginal at best. The first Kindle, which sold for $400 and was made by a company that had no track record in hardware, had a lot to overcome: the reluctance of the book industry to change its business model, the sentimentality of readers for the printed book, and its egregious industrial design, which looked like the product of the Soviet space program.

2007年公司首次推出它的電子閱讀器時，這款設備就是個昂貴的醜小鴨，前景顯得微不足道。第一代Kindle售價爲400美元（當時約合3000元人民幣），出自一個毫無硬件製造背景的公司，並且面臨重重困難：圖書業不願意改變其商業模式，讀者對紙質書懷有依戀的情愫，而且產品設計很笨拙，看上去像是蘇聯太空計劃的產物。

Worst of all, the Kindle was a dedicated machine. Its only purpose was to let you read books that you purchased from Amazon’s online store. In the age of smartphones and apps, when a single phone does just about everything, most dedicated devices have had a rough ride. Sales of snapshot cameras and digital have crashed because their functions were eaten by phones.

最糟的是，Kindle是臺專用的機器。它的唯一用處是讓你閱讀從亞馬遜的網店購買來的書。在智能手機和應用的時代，一部手機是無所不能的，專門性的設備大多處境艱難。快拍相機和數碼相機的銷售遭遇滅頂之災，就是因爲它們的功能被手機取代了。

But not the Kindle. Amazon’s e-reader hasn’t merely survived, but thrived, thanks to a single-minded focus on the needs of obsessive readers. Each year Amazon slightly improved the Kindle’s prices, hardware and software, making it more competitive with print, and roiling the publishing industry in the process.

但Kindle不一樣。由於專注考慮重度閱讀者的需求，亞馬遜的電子閱讀器不但活了下來，還發展得有聲有色。亞馬遜每年都會對Kindle的價格、硬件和軟件做出改進，讓它和紙質書相比更具競爭力，也讓出版業陷入恐慌。

Now, with its newest Kindle, the Voyage, Amazon is refining its e-reader once more. The Voyage’s main trick is a high-resolution display that mimics the look of a printed page. Text on its screen appears at a resolution of 300 pixels an inch, which is on par with the high-resolution displays now found on most of our other mobile devices.

現在亞馬遜推出了Kindle的最新款Voyage，再一次對它的電子閱讀器進行了改良。Voyage的主要賣點是模仿印刷紙面效果的高分辨率屏幕。這種屏幕上的文字是以每英寸300像素的分辨率顯示的，與現在市面上多數移動設備的高分辨率屏幕可等量齊觀。

Compared with previous Kindles, text on the Kindle Voyage appears both sharper and in starker relief against the background. Graphics, like charts and graphs, look just as clear as they do in any black-and-white book.

比起此前的Kindle，Kindle Voyage上的文字更清晰，和背景形成更鮮明的凸出效果。圖表等圖形看起來也更清晰了，就像在白底黑字的書上一樣。

The effect is beguiling. If you look at the new Kindle for any stretch of time, you don’t just forget that you’re reading an e-book; you forget that you’re using any kind of electronic device at all.

這樣的效果讓人心曠神怡。捧着新款Kindle閱讀，無論讀多長時間，你都不會意識到自己是在讀電子書，甚至都想不起自己是在用一臺電子設備。

Amazon says the Voyage offers a better approximation of print than has ever been available on an e-reader, but for me, it’s far better than that. It offers the visual clarity of printed text with the flexibility of an electronic device.

亞馬遜說Voyage是有史以來和印刷品最接近的電子閱讀器，但在我看來，它要比紙書好得多。它有印刷文字的視覺清晰度，又有電子設備的靈活性。

Given that combination, the Voyage functions as something like the executioner of the trusty old hardcover. Until recently, there were only two remaining reasons to hang on to books — either you just couldn’t get on board with the way a Kindle page looked, or you were suspicious of Amazon’s power and larger motives in the publishing industry, and you saw the printed book as the only bulwark against its overreach.

有了這兩個因素的結合，Voyage在某種程度上就成了一個劊子手，我們忠心耿耿的精裝書老朋友們將死在它的刀下。繼續看紙書的理由，近年來已經只剩下兩個——要麼你無法接受Kindle裏書頁的樣子，要麼你對亞馬遜的勢力以及在出版業的佈局持懷疑態度，你認爲要想遏制它的過度擴張，紙書是唯一一道屏障。

The first reason is now gone. The Voyage, which at $199 and up is Amazon’s most expensive Kindle, doesn’t look just like the printed page. Like other Kindles, it does things the printed page can’t do.

第一個原因已經不存在了。Voyage的售價爲199美元起，是目前亞馬遜最貴的一款Kindle設備，它不只是做出了紙張印刷的視覺效果。和其他Kindle一樣，它還能做紙書做不到的事。

Reading a long tome (say the “Game of Thrones” series) and you want to keep track of the characters? X-Ray, a feature built into most Kindle books, shows you a handy pop-up guide of every person you encounter. Need to look up a word? Just tap on it. Want to flip back and forth between footnotes and the main text? It’s just a matter of tapping; reading David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” on a Kindle isn’t the workout it is in print.

看一本大部頭的時候（比如“權力的遊戲”系列），想釐清人物的脈絡？多數Kindle書裏都有一個叫X-Ray的功能，通過一個很實用的彈出框來介紹你讀到的每個人物。想要查某個單詞？點一下就行。想在腳註和內文之間來回翻看？也是點按幾下就可以的事；在Kindle上讀大衛·福斯特·華萊士(David Foster Wallace)的《無盡的玩笑》(Infinite Jest)，不用像讀紙書那樣順便健身。

The Voyage is Amazon’s thinnest Kindle, but I found that advantage to be of little significance; Amazon’s other recent Kindles have also been very thin.

Voyage是亞馬遜迄今最薄的一款Kindle，但我發現這個優勢沒那麼明顯；亞馬遜近來推出的其他Kindle也很薄。

The Voyage also includes a new way to turn pages built into the plastic border of the device, right under where you’d rest your thumbs while holding it. To turn, you slightly pinch with either thumb; on other Kindles, you had to lift your finger and tap the screen. (You can also turn that way on the Voyage.) I found this method to be also only slightly helpful, because turning pages on other Kindles really wasn’t much of a hassle to begin with.

Voyage還引入了一種新的翻頁方式，內置在設備的塑料邊框裏，也就是在夾持着設備的手指下。要翻頁只需用手指輕輕捻一下；在其他的Kindle上，你得擡起手指觸擊屏幕。（在Voyage上也可以用這種方式翻頁。）我發現這種方法只能說是略有益處，因爲翻頁在其他Kindle上本身也談不上是個多大的麻煩。

So the only real reason to chose the Voyage over the other Kindles — the Paperwhite, which goes for $119, and the entry-level reader, which is $69 but doesn’t have a light — is its high-contrast display. For me, the Voyage’s display justifies the price. If you read often, you’ll want a high-quality screen, and this is one you’ll appreciate every single time you read.

那麼要選Voyage而不是其他Kindle——比如售價119美元的Paperwhite，還有售價69美元、但是沒有背光的入門級Kindle——理由就只剩下一個，它的高對比度屏幕。在我看來Voyage是配得上這個價格的。如果你閱讀量很大，就需要一個高品質的屏幕，而這塊屏幕，你每次用它都會注意到它的好處。