There is a commercial on TV now, I think it’s for the Kindle, where a woman is trying to defend her use of paper books against the Kindle. She must be dumb as a post, because the final argument she arrives at is that she enjoys the satisfaction of folding down a page to mark her place in her book. Even she acknowledges the stupidity of this claim at the end of the commercial.
Now I must admit that I like my first-gen Kindle, because:
- It makes Project Gutenberg books accessible (I read David Copperfield from Gutenberg on my Kindle, as the library book was too bulky and Gutenberg books have no expiration date)
- It enables you to carry multiple very bulky books around with you in a small volume
- It has free 3G and a semi-functional web browser (this was very nice before I had a 3G phone)
For these reasons I think a Kindle is a nice thing to have. But it can never replace the book. Aside from being able to fold down a page in a real book (if you care about that), many reasons for the overall superiority of real books stand out to me:
- The used book. I was at Half-Price Books yesterday and it occurred to me that nobody would ever be able to buy a used Kindle book at Half-Price; but I was able to pick up Nhat Hanh’s Living Buddha, Living Christ for $6. Try finding that price on the Internet!
- Books require no initial investment. This makes them an obviously better choice for the 99.5% of us on the planet who don’t have $300 to sink into a platform just to read books on, when such a platform is unnecessary.
- Books require no specialized gadget-knowledge. The Kindle may seem intuitive to those of us young enough not to remember the Carter administration, but let me tell you that my grandmother has owned one for three years now and is still not quite sure how to use it. She is not technologically ignorant, either; she uses a computer every day to edit the small newspaper she owns and runs.
I may be over-reacting to what is essentially a dumb and insulting commercial, but I felt obligated to defend books, as they have given me so much.