I keep hearing about Apple’s intentions to craft a version of ITunes that sits on a browser instead of it being an application that sits on your desktop. What this means, for those of you that have no idea what I just typed, is that you’d be able to use your ITunes and listen to your music on any computer (and probably your smartphone), instead of just on the computer where you have ITunes. This, of course, is very interesting.

For those of you that commute to jobs, for example, you wouldn’t need to bring your Ipod anymore, because your music would be sitting on a URL at your office. I would imagine Apple would possibly cut deals with the auto companies so you could access all your music through your car dashboard as well. For those of us that travel for work a lot, it would be great! I’d love to just open my laptop in my hotel room, go to my URL and have my whole library sitting there for me.

But beyond that, as a 38 year old guy, I’m not sure what the other benefits are. Am I missing something? I probably am. I’m not married to ITunes by any stretch, I’m simply married to whatever will work most seamlessly for me and right now, that’s ITunes. But eventually I’ll try Mog and perhaps get myself a Sonos S5 (check that out!) and experiment with what I can do at home. Because home is where I really dig in on the media side of things.

Then I keep thinking about the Kindle as well. I know I talked about it recently but I keep feeling like I can’t nail down the true reason why I holding off.  Shortly after my post in December, though, John Battelle totally nailed it with his post about the Kindle. I mean, check out this passage, where Battelle finally clarifies, with great accuracy, what I was trying to say:

It was clear to me that the Kindle breaks just about every one of the unwritten mores of how we, over hundreds of years, have honored books socially….And as a writer and lover of books, this makes the Kindle nothing more than a glorified Netbook – without the Net.

A few examples:

– You can’t share a Kindle book with anyone else. That’s just nuts. The sharing of a book is perhaps one of the most intimate and important intellectual acts between humans, ever. I’m not stuck on whether or not that sharing is physical. I’m stuck on the inability to share. It’s a crime.

– You can’t declare to anyone (including, importantly, reminding yourself) that you’ve read this book – an obstacle I’ll call “the library problem.” I love being surrounded by books I’ve read, and I love the fact that people who come to my office or my home library can see the books I’ve read. Yeah, part of it has to do with status. And does digital mean that status is going away? I don’t think so.

– You lose the serendipity of reading in public (and judging, as well as being judged for what is read in public)…..A Kindle suffers from a kind of social blindness – no one knows what you’re reading, unless they ask. Something important is lost when no one knows what you’re reading on the subway, the airplane, or the park bench. The opening salvos of countless relationships will no doubt be lost (though I suppose any number of romances have been kindled by the exuberant declaration of one’s love for the Kindle…).

That part about “the opening salvos of countless relationships” – that hits home, man! If everyone had a Kindle, you’d never be able to, say, engage someone on an airplane about a book. That seems patently wrong to me. It’s a word without sociology and I don’t think I can deal with that. The full Battelle post is here and it’s really worth a read. I would so LOVE to have a device to read newspapers and magazines on, but I don’t think I can do books.