Woe be unto ye

On Jan 6, 10:36*pm, "Russell D." wrote:
On 01/06/2011 07:09 PM, Giles wrote:





On Jan 6, 5:56 pm, "Russell *wrote:

I love books. Always have. I grew up in a home without television. So
books were our escape, our entertainment. Especially during those long
Idaho/Wyoming winters.

I love to have books. I like their smell, their look, their heft. I love
to see rows of them on my bookshelves.

When I first heard of the Kindle a few years ago I considered it a
damnable object to be scorned. I saw it as a threat to those books that
I loved.

But, the more I learned and the more I thought about it the more I
realized that as much as I love books, I love more the words in those
books. I came to realize that the Kindle is a great way to carry around
those words. Lots of those words.

August 1st I preordered the new "Kindle 3" and it showed up the first
week of September. In short, the Kindle is a great reading tool. I have
read more books since September than I have in the last year and a half.
The simple reason is because I always have it with me and find all kinds
of opportunities to read. That dreaded forty-five minute wait in the
doctor's office is now a pleasant escape into some book until that
annoying nurse pops out and says, "The doctor will see you now." It is
much easier to carry around than a book (or books--I'm always reading
several books).

So congrats on the new Kindle. I think you'll enjoy it. I highly
recommend getting a cover for it. Not only does it protect it, it makes
it seem more bookish. The Amazon.com covers are very well made, but
there are lots of others out there.

I love my Kindle.

Russell

Great stuff, Russell.

I can find only one minor point to disagree with; "It is much easier
to carry around than a book...". *My Kindle (with cover.....thanks for
the advice on that, I'd have followed it, but my sister is nothing if
not thorough) is roughly the size and weight of an average trade
paperback.....actually, a bit thinner, but otherwise very similar.
Not particularly "easier" to carry than a book.....but certainly AS
easy.....and, yes, most certainly easier than several books, an
affliction we share.

Yeah, that was worded poorly. Many of the DTB (Dead Tree Books) that I
have read in the past couple of years have been rather large.
"Einstein," "1776," "D-Day," "Team of Rivals," "John Adams," etc. have
all been much larger than my Kindle. That should have read "easier to
carry around than *many* books."

Ah, books like those, yes, the Kindle is certainly eaiser to carry.
And it is easier to carry than pretty much any two books, regardless
of size, let alone many.

Meanwhile, the jury is still out as to whether these things are a
genuine damnable threat to our shared love. *A year ago I'd have said,
hell no. *Actually, I did.....although not so moderately. *Now, I'm
not so sure, for various reasons that would bore the vast majority
here. *In any case, the extinction of the book (if, indeed, it occurs
in the not too distant future.....as seems ever more likely) will be
brought about, primarily, by other more sinister agents than a device
which, after all, preserves the words you and I love so much.

Actually, I am now more convinced that they will not replace books for a
long time. Many books just do no work well on them. I purchased one book
on my Kindle that had a lot of illustrations that text kept referring
to. It was very inconvenient to try and go back and forth from the text
to the illustration. I ended up buying the book. Also, at least for me,
technical books don't work very well on the Kindle. I tend to do a lot
of flipping back and forth in books like that and that just doesn't work
well on the Kindle. At least yet. But, for novels, biographies, etc. it
work extremely well.

Ditto. Every word of it.

And there's more. The feel of myriad kinds of paper and of the words
on the pages. The familiarity of the spines on the bookshelf,
recognizable from across the room. Wandering the stacks in a good
bookstore or library, picking at random or carefully choosing by
title, cover art, author, weight, binding or a host of other factors.
The history of each individual volume, written in coffee, wine,
cheese, breadcrumbs, ashes, tears, dogears, marginalia, bookmarks,
bookplates, inscriptions, dedications, pressed flowers bodily
fluids.....

A book.....a REAL book.....is a container filled not just with words
and ideas, but with all the human effluvia that can find its way onto
or between the pages.

And I can have fifty or a hundred books circulating in a room occupied
by ten or twenty people. Try that with a bucket of Kindles. It
simply would not work without some compelling reason. The difference
is that books are in themselves sufficiently compelling reason.

Wolfgang
read on bruthas and sistas!

PTB!

?

Wolfgang