That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the world of commerce to reduce my reading to a slab of electronic components, or take up piles of paperbacks from the local brick-and-mortar stores and, by collecting, keep them open for business?
There are so many electronic reading gizmos on the market right now, that I’m reminded of the video VHS/Beta Wars, the Blue Ray and Toshiba’s HD DVD Battle, the skirmish between film and digital cameras, all of which happened in my lifetime and have left mountainous piles of cyber waste in their wake. Tablets and e-readers will come and go over the next year or so before the dust clears and winners emerge.
Now that books are being challenged by the e-reader, a thin miniature computer which seizes whole texts from cyberspace and puts them on a screen for viewing anytime you wish, sales are as high as a library bookshelf. The format is still young; users can actually “turn pages” by pressing a button. With so many versions out there, only one or two are bound to survive. Fortunately two are holding the lead right now.
The Amazon Kindle is the one which has become its own verb (folks in the publishing industry refer to Kindling new reading products). The next commonly found one is Barnes and Noble’s Nook, which comes with a color screen. I haven’t heard anybody talking about Nooking a book, but when I think of Kindling, I think of building a fire (the temperature of which must be 451 degrees to burn a regular book, so I’m told).
I like having a shelf full of books. I’ve known many folks who have vast libraries of books, and I can’t imagine life without them. Electronics can be shut off, but books can be dried off when wet, taped when ripped and picked up without so much as a gasp if they are dropped. Try doing that with a $300 Kindle. The worst that can happen with a book is a dirty, wet or kinked page or two, keeping in mind that books have an equal chance of landing pages down or landing fully shut (thereby losing your place for you).
I’m on the fence about buying a slab to store my books. If books become targets of cyber crime, nobody would have to hold a match to them; they could just enter some code and my storehouse could disappear in a blip. However, the convenience of having reading material in half the space and at a fraction of the weight (think of eliminating school backpacks) makes it tempting to cave. Since I’m in no hurry, I’ll watch and wait, hiding behind my current paperback.
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