A few weeks ago, I passed a girl sitting in the window of an NYC coffee shop. She didn’t notice me staring at her because she was glued to the text on her very stylish Kindle. I had glimpsed the future, and admittedly it left me feeling old and a bit nauseous at this sign of progress. Just trying to use the web browser on my husband’s small-buttoned Blackberry makes me want to toss it out the car window. Books have been my safe haven from all this technology; the sweet smell of paper and ink my comforting escape from the demands of that ever-blinking cursor.
A few days later my mom asked me if I’d heard of these Kindle things. She thought I might like one for Christmas.
“We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading,” writes Clive Thompson in Wired. “Every other form of media that’s gone digital has been transformed by its audience. Whenever a newspaper story or TV clip or blog post or white paper goes online, readers and viewers begin commenting about it on blogs, snipping their favorite sections, passing them along. The only reason the same thing doesn’t happen to books is that they’re locked into ink on paper. Release them, and you release the crowd.”
So what do you think? Will your reading experience be improved if you can Facebook your favorite passages? Gchat your way through the complex points of the philosophy you’re studying? Find that sentence you know you read 30 or so pages back with a simple keyword search?
UPDATE: When we all own Kindles, what happens at book signings?
While my affection for new digital delivery systems has been Kindled, I won’t be entirely thrilled until they develop the technology that can make the Kindle smell like an old book. Ahhhh…
Molly adds: Seriously! When I was a kid, my dad taught me how to tell a really good one by cracking it open to the center and taking a deep breath. Electronic items that smell of warm plastic don’t really offer much in that department.
Mmm. Plastic. You hit a nerve, Molly!
I realized after getting a Kindle (my Stepdad passed along is 1.0 model to me – which was very nice of him to do…) that the way I read is very “un-Kindle-like.” Especially when it comes to non-fiction. I tend to read one step forward two steps back if that makes any sense. I’ll be in the middle of one chapter and realize I need to return to a previous chapter to refresh my memory regarding a date in history or the name of some French prince etc so I move back and forth a lot. And you just can’t do that on a Kindle.
I also love a good index and use them often when reading.
And illustrations! One of the first books I downloaded was Ned Sublette’s Cuba and Its Music and I quickly realized that I was going to seriously miss the maps and photos that accompany his incredibly detailed history of the development of Cuban popular music. Geography is not my strength. Argh!
I hate to say this, but we composers are often the ones who actually buy into this bull that if its NEW it must be a STEP FORWARD when in actuality you lose something (or several things) with any technological “development.” Anyone who is honest (and has ears) and works with digital recording tools will confirm this.
P.S. Just yesterday I was telling a couple friends about the first time I smelled the smell of vinyl in a fully stocked record store in Columbus, Ohio circa 1975. Mmm. Vinyl…