Print, E-books, blah, blah, blah

So let’s check in on the issue.

Since I last wrote about this (who knows when), one of my older sons has acquired a Sony E-Reader of some sort which he LOVES.   He has downloaded lots of public domain stuff onto it as well as more current books, and he carts it around with him all the time.  I tried it, but I don’t like it because it’s a gray background. What can I say? I’m 50. I need contrast.

I recently upgraded and acquired my first smartphone, which is a Droid. I downloaded Kindle on it, just to see, and bought a book – Laura Lippman’s latest, I’d Know You Anywhere.

(Short book review- eh. It was my first Lippman and it wasn’t the scintillating read I expected from what I’ve read from people who adore Lippman.)

So here’s my report:

I liked reading on the Droid, but not as a replacement for books at all.  It’s going to be a niche kind of experience for me – as in, I’ll definitely  use it regularly and will always have a book going on it: whipping it out when waiting in line, sitting in karate class, etc. But it won’t replace physical books for me.

What I missed about a physical book was this:

I missed the relationship with a singular object that represents, in that separateness, in that singularity, a unique experience.

(Please note, this is not the way I normally talk.)

I think lifelong, passionate readers have relationships with books that are embodied in the physicality of the book.   A book – not just the words, but the thing -  represents something to you – something of what you learned in the reading, something of what the experience of reading meant to you.  I read all of the Chronicles of Narnia in the space of a week or so, sitting underneath a neighbor’s willow tree in Lawrence, Kansas. Whenever I see that particular cover of those editions, I think of that moment. The second quarter of my freshman year in college (UT was on the quarter system then), I took my first upper-level history class, and the text was E.F. Thompson’s History of The English Working Class.  I kept that book for a very long time, and just even seeing it on the shelf took me back to when I was 18 and feeling sort of awed at the possibilities of learning and ways of seeing the world.

I could go on. And so could you.

It wouldn’t be the same if all I had to remember were words on a screen.

Is this nostalgia? In the sense that any relationship with any object that gives clues about the past is nostalgia, perhaps.  But it’s not meaningless nostalgia, for no relationship, even with a book, is meaningless, and since we are embodied creatures, the shape and form of what we have relationships factors into our memories.

There was something else, and this was something I couldn’t have anticipated. As I was reading the book on my Droid, what I missed was…not being able to tell where I was in the book. Yes, it tells you what percentage of the book you have accessed, but that’s not the same as holding the book and knowing you still have halfway to go or you only have ten pages or so to go. It was odd to feel so adrift, so rootless, in the act of reading.

It actually annoyed me.

So there you go. I don’t know why the discussions on this have to be either/or, because I find that it’s just not that way for me. I read quite a bit on the Internet, but I also read actual magazines – longer pieces, for me, require pages, not a screen.  My book reading, for the forseeable future will be mostly from, you know, books, but I’ll happily download books to Kindle to read on my Droid, as well  – mostly light reading, I expect.

Since I have three young adult children,  and they are supposedly the wave of the future, I’ll take a minute and review their relationships with all of this, too.

All three are readers of one kind or another, but only the middle one reads on an e-reader, and he’s also the one who’s always been the biggest Techie of the three of them. Chris, the oldest (28! Years old!) is in a very high-tech kind of career, but he doesn’t do e-readers. Katie is probably the most passionate reader of them all, and I can’t see her ever giving up her physical, concrete books in favor of exclusive e-reading experiences.  She love reading, but she also loves her books. They mean a great deal to her.

This past summer, the summer before she went off to college, she re-read a lot of the books of her adolescence, and I’m certain it wasn’t only about the letters forming words in front of her eyes. It was also about the objects made out of paper, the well-worn covers feeling weighty and familiar in her hand, these friends who’d waited for her at the end of the day in Indiana as she navigated the newness and strangeness of high school, had suffered being packed up and moved in boxes to Alabama, then brought out again to comfort her in a new place,then  in completely unexpected and painful circumstances and then, still familiar, still faithful friends, giving her solace and grounding one more time as she huddled with them, holding them in her hands as she’d held them two, three, five or even ten years ago – drinking in their stories in  those hot summer nights before she moved on.

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