(This was written originally 11/29/2007)
The NPR radio program "On the Media" ran a segment on the e-book reader and mentioned the Kindle. In addition there was an interview with a writer whose name escapes me but the title of his essay remains: "Hamlet's Blackberry." What he said at least in the interview was that paper itself is a technology. Those of us who have been around for sometime before this wonderful e-revolution still require that we have the feel of paper, the feel of a book in our hands as we read. Our hands in some way inform us in this process of reading and in fact do quite a bit of work. These days as a retiree I don't buy newspapers much but read them online. On the rare occasion when I do encounter a newspaper I realize how much I miss holding the paper and scanning the page and folding it up and pulling out sections and so on. And if I want to look at an advertisement I will. . . and if I don't want to I don't.
But I gave this Kindle some thought. It would be great to carry around 200 books with me. But does anyone have any idea how long it takes to read 200 books? It's not like I'm going to read them all in a Subway ride on the F-train on my way into Manhattan from Brooklyn. Besides all these years I've always felt close to my books, to the paper, to the feel of new pages and being able to mark up something, some scrap of thought in the columns. I love the look of different fonts. I love to see how far I've gone along and how far yet I have to go. And I sometimes love to just flip back and check out the first few pages and maybe skim them while I keep keep my thumb as a place marker. And then I love to look at my book shelves and sometimes pull down a book I read long ago and just look at it and feel it or skim through again or maybe even decide to read it again. Often memories come back of a different time and it evokes a certain feeling.
So no Kindle for me ever. The problem I see is that the e-revolution has just allowed us to become a more of a throw away, uniform society than we were before. The mystery and the wonder of a book will hold nothing for us anymore. In fact with computers the concept of wonder no longer holds a thrill for us. I think it was Goethe who said that the highest form of thought is wonder. Sadly with the internet beneath our fingers wonder is just a word on Wikipedia.
