Arrogance

In an interesting article in today's New York Times about whether the Amazon Kindle is likely or not to be a success (he thinks it is), Randall Stross says:

Stephen P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, has nothing to fear from the Kindle. No one would regard it as competition for the iPod. It displays text in four exciting shades of gray, and does that one thing very well. It can do a few other things: for instance, it has a headphone jack and can play MP3 files, but it is not well suited for navigating a large collection of music tracks.

Yet, when Mr. Jobs was asked two weeks ago at the Macworld Expo what he thought of the Kindle, he heaped scorn on the book industry. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read any more,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”

I've often wondered if the air of superiority that characterises most Mac users is purely coincidental - the way some evolutionary traits just happen to appear side-by-side - or whether, like all the bits needed to expand Apple computers, it's product-specific, up its own arse and basically anti-literate.

It looks like the latter.