I’m a Kindle lover but to be fair here’s the other side
Read Time:56 Second
Unless all the hype is wrong, e-readers like the Kindle are the future—and precisely the sort of thing a twentysomething technophile who loves to read must adore, right? Meet 26-year-old Emma Silvers, who explains in Salon why she’s actually a little repulsed by the idea and won’t give up her beloved real books. Part of it is the thing itself: “To deny books their physical structure simply ignores far too much of what makes them enjoyable,” she writes. “The commitment they require, the way they force you into a state of simultaneous calm and focus.”
And then there’s all this multitasking nonsense. “The capabilities that Kindle lovers extol as having improved their reading experience are, in fact, the very features that make me want to run in the opposite direction. The highlighting. The online ‘sharing.’ The ability to just zip on over to Facebook for a minute.” And her least favorite feature of all—having thousands of titles at the fingertips. “Will anyone ever finish Infinite Jest on a device that constantly presents other options?” Click the Salon link for the full essay.
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Krell, you read my mind, on both counts..
There is much beauty in both.
Centuries in the future Jean-Luc Picard still read books.
Jean-Luc Picard does it, I believe it, that settles it.
Nothing beats the feel of a nice hard bound book and some tea on a sunny afternoon. Well almost nothing…
“Will anyone ever finish Infinite Jest on a device that constantly presents other options?” Has anyone ever finished reading Infinite Jest presented in any form? I have a copy of it on my book shelf in fairly pristine shape with the exception of the first 40 pages.
By the way…my book is also available on Kindle! LMAO!
Hey way to go with marketing.
Move over Technology…reality fights back! Yes, just feeling the pages in your hands is enough to leave the Kindle at home!
…and you can actually swat insects with it while you read it!! Try slamming a fly on the table with your Kindle!! Ha!
It’s technology Jim….but not as us old farts want it…
Sorry… the site is “Voice of the Shuttle”.
If Kindle gets people reading again, it’s a great tool. For me, nothing brings me in direct contact with the past like an actual manuscript. I once had the opportunity to view a political brochure from the early 1700s when I interned for a rare book library during grad school. I had the opportunity to view and touch pre-15th Century books, hand-witten during Chaucer’s era. To hold a historical manuscript from the era of a work of that era was astounding: that the marginalia was penned by Jonathan Swift was something of a religious experience. A great site is Voice of the Shuttke, a repository of great works spanning many eras. Both electronic and print media hprovide wonderful opportunities for reading, but many great books have yet to be in online formats.
Stella – Great point about the sense connectedness that can take place with others that have touched the book–you mention Jonathan Swift–I have a few books that have been “touched by the hands” of the authors, and for other used books that I own I frequently pay as much attention to what prior readers have underlined, highlighted or written in the margins as I do to the book itself–did prior readers entirely miss the author’s points? Or can their notes lend a fresh perspective on the topic for me? It’s priceless.
She gave the exact reason I gave my Kindle to an aunt, something I hadn’t even bothered opening I had received as a gift. I just cannot see myself not holding the book and turning the pages. Now my aunt, she loves it and says she still does the reading the old fashioned way, but if she goes anywhere this little doodad takes up less room. Me myself and I just prefer the dog eared copies of loved books. Hey Mike, did you ever get that Passage book? I am almost done with it, started reading it Tuesday and it really is a good read.
I did Jess. Uploaded it to my Kindle five minutes after you mentioned it to me. Almost finished myself.
Just finished with it. This is one I will be doing the re reading and re reading over again. That was a mighty good read and totally kept the page turning. I couldn’t put it down last night till about 3 this morning. Had to find out what happened and just couldn’t wait.
If any of the rest of you are reading this reply, I highly recommend this book. The Passage, Justin Cronin. Never heard of him till this and will definitely be reading his other stuff, if it’s anything like this one. 2 very big thumbs up, without giving any spoilers.
If I were able to do more “pleasure reading,” I might go for the Kindle. When reading for my work (which admittedly I do take pleasure in), the library that I amass comes to form a unique physical body representative of the ideas that have come before mine and that have collectively shaped my worldview. To be surrounded by that is too satisfying to consider giving up, even if having so many books does make moving a pain in the *ss.