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December 18, 2009
50 in 50. Kindle lust
The other night I boarded a flight from Toronto to Newark. And in the aisle seat across from me was a man cradling a Kindle, Amazon’s wireless reading device.
“Ooh,” I said, like a teenage girl eyeing a hot new handbag or a Jonas brother.
The man could clearly sense my interest. “Want to see it?” he offered.
I did. It wasn’t the first Kindle I had ever fondled, but I was in a heightened state of awareness. Lately in my book-crazed family, there had been many discussions about the relative merits of electronic reading devices vs. traditional books. The idea that you could have access to many titles at a time was of great interest to family members who were horrified by the prospect that they would ever be caught without something to read.
I stopped pressing the buttons and spoke to the Kindle’s owner. “Do you like it?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “I’ve had it for a year, and I love it. The Kindle makes reading so easy that I’ve read more books than ever. Why, I’ve probably read 100 books this year.”
100 books! Obviously, this man had been living my dream. I’ve been losing steam on my quest to read 50 books in 50 days, but maybe my problem is technological. If I had a Kindle, all my problems would be solved. I’d become a reading demon. I could read a book a day. 365 a year. 3,650 a decade! I’d be the best-read person on the planet.
But then I looked at the old-fashioned paper book I’d been reading and reality set in. I had folded down pages that were particularly interesting to me. The book was filled with my multi-colored Post-It notes. I had a tactile relationship with books that went way beyond words on a page. I didn’t just read a book; I devoured it.
I gave the Kindle back to its owner. The device was obviously too polished, too cool for me. I was a messy-paper, not a perfect-device kind of person.
Marshall McLuhan, the philosopher and media scholar, once said, “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.”
But, when it comes to the Kindle, McLuhan is wrong. The Kindle is perfect. I’m not. And owning one wouldn't change that.
Back to the books.
Posted by Alison Davis at December 18, 2009 04:06 PM
(Find me around the web)
