TechNOlogy ...To E or Not To E, That Is the Question

Part of the enjoyment of reading, for me, is actually holding the book in my hands, whether I’m curled in my comfy chair or sitting in the doctor’s waiting room or on a bench in an airport. Sometimes I even read while striding through the house, Amazon Kindle something I am wont to do when I’m really engaged and must go into another room to turn off the oven or answer the phone. The drawback here is that I have a lot of shin bruises from bumping into furniture because my eyes are on the page.

But aside from accidental contact with the furniture, physical contact with a book is just pleasurable to me, freighted as it is with long memory. When I get a new book, I spend a bit of time handling it before I start reading, feeling its weight, observing its design, riffling the pages. When I was a kid, I would actually open a book and put my nose right down into it to take a good sniff of paper and printers’ ink. Try that with an e book and you’ll likely smudge the screen as you accidentally turn the page with your nose.

However, it is increasingly obvious that the e-book in all its permutations is the wave of the future, if not for yours truly, certainly for our children and grandchildren.

As with all new projects, our public libraries are struggling with the parameters of e-book usage. If you’re interested in a concise explanation of their dilemma, last March the New York Times did a column on the subject, when Harper-Collins put restrictions on the amount of time their e-books could be loaned out.

It seems to me that one of the best parts about getting old is that you suddenly realize it’s quite all right not to have an opinion on things that are not going to concern you. This e-book business is probably one of those things: I trust that librarians and publishers will be able to work their way through to accommodation without benefit of my advice.

Just leave me alone with my books, my real, physical, weighty books. The sight of them on the shelves brings warmth and comfort to a room. Their only drawback is that when I’m not using them, I have to dust them. Some day, I tell myself, I will catalogue them properly, but for now they are casually grouped according to author and/or subject. Some of them are falling apart from overuse. Some of their pages have evidence of coffee spills or greasy fingers. There are some I’ve never yet gotten to; they stand there reproachfully, in pristine condition. I love them all, even my ratty old paperbacks of everything Dorothy L. Sayers ever wrote, and a first edition of Winnie the Pooh, and my grandmother’s bound copies of The St. Nicholas Magazine. They aren’t especially useful; they’re just lovable.

In this modern age, bookshelves may soon be relics of the past, but I would caution future generations to keep a few around. When electrical power is out for any length of time, your e-books won’t operate for very long. And if an asteroid strikes or nuclear war breaks out, you’d better hope that you are within reach of a real, old-fashioned, book-bearing library. You’ll find me back somewhere in the stacks, along with the other antediluvians.

Images: Barnes & Noble's Nook Kids , Amazon's Kindle eBook, Winnie the Pooh 1926 edition image from Wikipedia

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TechNOlogy ...To E or Not To E, That Is the Question

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