Over beer and burgers the other night, my friend T. was talking up Kindle. T’s a smart guy and a savvy writer on things techy, and since I don’t fully get the Kindle phenomenon, I’d asked him what he liked about it. And T., in the course of his typically coherent response, mentioned something that I’d heard from other Kindle-loving friends. With Kindle, he said, you don’t have to carry around big piles of books. They’re all in one little device!
What’s odd about this (and I want to articulate this without veering off into the territory of the Luddite rant, because for all I know I will have my own Kindle someday soon and will be declaring my own love for the device for making my life so much better) is that in all my years of reading, I’ve never felt oppressed by the onerous task of carrying around books. I brought a half-dozen or so along on a recent weeklong trip to New Mexico and they caused me no trouble. If I’d had their electronic versions all loaded up in a Kindle it would have saved me a little space and a little weight in my bag, which I would have taken up with—what, more socks? But I like the physical, pulpy presence of books. I like even the weight of them. (We have some real behemoths laying around the house. One of them, the 1634-page Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, is currently holding open the door to our back porch. Try that with a Kindle on a breezy day.) I like carrying them around in a bag over my shoulder. They feel like Christmas presents waiting to be opened.
Books—physical books—sometimes even feel like a physical comfort. Here’s Nicholson Baker in his novel The Anthologist: “What I do is I sleep with my books. And I know that’s kind of weird and solitary and pathetic. But if you think about it, it’s very cozy. Over a period of four, five, six, seven, nine twenty nights of sleeping, you’ve taken all these books to bed with you, and you fall asleep, and the books are there.”
I ran across the books-are-too-heavy argument again in this story about a prep-school library that is dispensing with its books and replacing them with flat-screen TVs, laptop-friendly work stations and electronic readers loaded with digital material. (They’re also building a new coffee shop with a “$12,000 cappuccino machine.”) The piece quotes a junior who likes the idea because “the more we use e-books, the fewer books we have to carry around.”
For the pro-paper perspective, the story offers this from media critic William Powers:“There is a kind of deep-dive, meditative reading that’s almost impossible to do on a screen. Without books, students are more likely to do the grazing or quick reading that screens enable, rather than be by themselves with the author’s ideas.’’
That’s probably even more persuasive than Baker’s books-are-fun-to-sleep-with argument. But then I’m already sold on paper. I wonder what any Kindle-ites out there make of Powers’ point about grazing versus deep-diving. Would anyone miss the serendipity of coming upon a book while browsing the stacks? And, while we’re at it, do you ever sleep with your Kindle?
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I think you lack comments because you're intimidatingly witty. Probably I feel that way because I can't think of anything useful to say, except that I agree.
ReplyDeleteI am a fan of the book as object myself, but I can definitely see how it might be convenient to have multiple books at the ready. However, for me, I think the chief advantage of an electronic reader could be an ability to read with the lights off. But the Kindle, at least in its current incarnation, has not backlighting option, so you still need to leave the lights on. Where's the fun in that?
ReplyDeleteJR, thanks for checking in. And HMW, thanks for bringing up lighting. Reading in bed without resorting to lamps or booklights, and without having to wake up your wife turning a noisy page, would be a plus. Adam Gopnik wrote in the New Yorker a while back about his dissatisfaction with his collection of booklights. He recommended reading by candle light. Another idea I haven't tried.
ReplyDeleteI love books. I love owning them and having them cozy up my home. I always worry about people when I visit and there are no books on their shelves. However, my stock is getting a bit out of control, and we've been trying to purge some of the nonessentials from our library. That's what tempts me about the Kindle...the ability to conserve space and still read the less-literary selections I enjoy too.
ReplyDeleteI am vehemently anti-Kindle for a number of reasons, many of them having to due with authors' rights issues. One a more personal level, I offer the following: Books smell good. They feel good in your hands, or resting on your chest after you've fallen asleep. They, as you pointed out, have other uses (doorstop, bookend, curled-up-paper-flattener). Kindles do none of those things and may, in fact, eat your book if Amazon gets in a publishing tussle. Amazon has never to my knowledge snuck into my house late at night and reclaimed a book I purchased from them. Then again, my book collection rivals that of Burgess Meredith in that old "Twilight Zone" episode...but, I digress. In summation: Books, yes. Kindle, never.
ReplyDeleteI'll never say never; I'm, like you, attracted to the idea of lots of books in a little device for travel. But I do like to find paperbacks in my bed with the covers soft, slept on.
ReplyDeleteI had never heard of that "deep-dive" expression, but it certainly holds true for me. I can't imagine being that absorbed by anything in a Kindle.
ReplyDeleteLSM, Lass, Jeanne, Cranky, thank you all for joining in and making me feel a little better about my Kindle-sketpicism.
ReplyDeleteI have slept with my Kindle (more or less):
ReplyDeletehttp://hyper-talk.blogspot.com/2009/05/close-call.html