With all of the doomsday talk around E-books, E-readers, and everything prefaced with E, I thought I'd throw a thought into the mix.
I love technology. While I may not own an iPhone, I could accurately be described as transhumanist. When the day arrives that we can trade in our organs for nanobots, I will be first in line.
But, you see, I have this bookshelf.
It's not much. It's way too small and has already overflowed, leaving me to pile books on every precious piece of uncluttered horizontal surface space, but it's mine. Those are all books that I have bought, kept well, and can read at any time. When my nieces and nephews are older, and if—gods forbid—I ever spawn a creature of my own, they will have them available at any time.
But could I lend them my
Kindle?
When I was a child, my family had a bookcase. It was giant, ancient, and held all the knowledge of the world. (Actually, it was about seven feet tall, built by my father, and filled with yellowing paperbacks, but I was a kid, so it seemed more dramatic.) The top shelf held my dad's nonfiction, mainly, large volumes on nature and history and guns. Below that were several shelves of everything from Lord of The Rings to Dean Koontz, but mostly Stephen King and Tom Clancy. LOTS of Stephen King. Everything he had published, in fact. Then there was the bottom. It was stocked with Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, R.L. Stine, children's science and puzzle books, and a pleasant array of other random things my parents would add.
One of my favorite activities was to sit down in front it all and just pull books out, looking through them, examining the covers. Before I could even read, I was fascinated by books. Here, standing against the wall, was a portal into worlds far away from the tiny cluster of houses surrounding a grain elevator that made up my neighborhood. As I learned to read, I was ever more infatuated. It evolved. I had an argument with my brother about whether bullfrogs ate worms or not; we looked it up. I was right. I crawled up the bookcase from Suess to Silverstein to Stine to King.
By sixth grade I was marveling at Stephen King novels, and writing "books" that somehow always ended at less than three pages. I had long since known I would be a writer, but that's not the point. The point is, even before I could read, I knew I would be a
reader, and when the time came, I had ample material to read.
I didn't live in a town big enough for a library. With our large family, we rarely got to go to the bookstore. (Though when the Book Fair came to school I always got to pick two books.) All of those books sitting there, like gold in Scrooge McDuck's vault, ready for swimming, are what made me the reader I am today, and, consequently, made me the
person I am today.
If all of my books are on my reader, how am I supposed to pass that experience on? Would handing a child a Kindle have the same effect? Am I nitpicking, or perhaps alone in this kind of memory?
Don't misunderstand me. I think e-paper is awesome, and LOVE the idea of downloading a Virginia Woolf novel for ninety-nine cents. I don't think books will disappear any time soon, but, sure as dogs are damned to hell, e-books are where we're headed. It makes me wonder what may change without our noticing.
