Kindle: Warm Spark or Destructive Fire?

I’m the kind of person who wanders around a bookstore picking up books just to feel them. I love to open a book that’s never been opened, to run my fingers over the virgin pages. Let’s be honest: I cuddle books. I caress them, I stroke them, I breathe in their inky perfume. Eventually I take them home and make them my pets.

I never feel lonely if there are piles of books in every room. In my comfy chair by the fire, I am perfectly happy just gazing sideways at my bookshelf, admiring the various titles and fonts, the colors of the dustjackets, the publishers’ symbolic logos on the spines. I can wallow for hours in happy anguish over which book to start next. At some point, I choose one. After consuming every word on the dust jacket, examining the front matter and table of contents, and leafing through a few pages, I finally begin to read. And for a short time, all’s right with the world. Or should I say without the world.

So reading for me is an experience of physical comfort as well as intellectual stimulation and emotional contentment--all provided by a handful of compressed wood pulp covered with tiny black symbols. It’s hard to imagine the pleasure of reading without the book itself, or with another kind of “book,” something with a different form and feel—say a small plastic box with a screen. Horrors! part of me thinks. That’s not a book! It doesn’t look like a book, feel like a book, smell like a book, or quack like a book. I can’t read that! What’s the world coming to?