I like gadgets. I have an ipod and a fancy new cell phone that can do way more than a mobile telephone really needs to do. We have a television that’s screen is way bigger than is truly necessary, and what maybe construed as a fancy surround sound system. I did push for my fiance and I to get a Mac and am still pushing to get the last PC laptop out of our home for a macbook. I even have a silly satellite radio in my car because regular radio just isn’t enough, even though on the clearest of days my satellite radio listening is often interrupted to “acquire” a signal. What I am trying to say, and justify to myself, is that I am not a technophobe. For the most part I like the evolution of technology and all the crazy gadgets that we are learning we “need” in our hands or pocket or home, and I’m riding the wave along with most.
Here is what I don’t get though, the ebook. The Kindle (Amazon), the PRS-500 (Sony) and the Nook (Barns & Noble),the ipad (Apple) can even kind of be lumped into this group of mini computers designed with the primary purpose of allowing you to read a book. There are even plenty of digital libraries and book stores on the web that will happily let you buy and sell electronic copies of books. The concept of holding a slim little piece of technology in your hands that allows you download almost any book, read it from almost any location, and hardly miss a beat from finishing one book and starting the next should be appealing to a book lover. Compared to some gadgets, televisions and computers, the cost of an electronic reader device ranging from $149 to $500 and the ebook cost ranging from $3 to $15 it sounds par for the course.
As a person who loves to read, who feels naked without a book clutched in my hands under my arm or in my purse, who has admittedly spent many nights reading till my eyelids are just too heavy to fight only to fall asleep and dream about how the book will end, the ebook concept should sound like a dream come true. I didn’t fight the wave when music was being shared, transferred and sold online instead of record stores. I love the fact that I can rent movies without leaving my house and will never miss the experience of walking around a video store. I can’t do it though, I can’t give up on the real libraries with card catalogs and Dewy Decimal systems, the book stores that I can physically stand in and walk around for hours and most of all my dear dear book shelves that are overflowing with countless books.
I thought the fear was still that online sales of actual books at places like Amazon.com would be the demise of real book stores and libraries. I understood that conundrum. There is nothing better than buying a book online for a penny and even with paying $3.99 in shipping you can get a real book with pages for four dollars! Even with that online recourse I am sure there are many people like myself that still buy books from real stores if only because they want that book right now and can’t possibly wait the three to 14 days for it to be shipped to them. So though it was (is) a scary thought to imagine a world without a public library and book stores that you could get lost in, I just didn’t think it would come to that. Now I fear a threat on books not just bookstores and libraries and that upsets me even more.
There is nothing in this world like reading a good book. Curling up under a blanket on a rainy day, or lying under the sun on the beach with a real book in your hands. The experience of turning the pages and creasing them to hold your place, and finding the ticket stubs and other random artifacts that you or the previous reader used as a bookmark. The smell of the pages of an old book that has been read and enjoyed more times that can be told. There is so much more than just the story printed in ink that a book can tell, and I can sincerely say that one of my most cherished possessions are the books on my shelves with stickers from libraries that owned them long ago, coffee ring stains on some pages and covers and plenty of stories to tell.
Heres to a world that will always have libraries, bookstores and generations and generations of people who know the joy the feeling of a real book in their hands.
