Whither the Book? Or, Reading My Kindle in Bed
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I purchased the new biography of George Washington by Ron Chernow on my Kindle. I purchased it at 9 o'clock at night from my parents sofa, paid half as much as I would have paid had I bought it in a shop, and began reading it on the same sofa one minute after I bought it. While enjoying my new purchase, I thought to myself, "I should ask for the actual book for Christmas." But then I immediately thought, "Why?" The book is 928 pages long. It probably weighs about four pounds. Now that I own the Kindle version, would I ever actually read this paper behemoth? Probably not. And why was I so quick to think that the Kindle book wasn't an *actual* book? It is. Of course it is. Isn't it?As fun as nostalgia can sometimes be, I don't like to rhapsodize one form of technology over another just because it's been around longer. And the book as an object is essentially a technology artifact, Patti Smith's recent heartfelt ode to paper, ink, and cloth notwithstanding. Surely the whole point here is <i>reading</i>, and I actually enjoy reading books on my Kindle even more than I enjoy reading them in print.Yet I can't deny that there is a part of me that would love to see that George Washington bio up on my shelf.
