I swear I’m not. I still love the smell, the feel, the weight, the crispness, the colors, and the fact that you can dog-ear the pages. I love the way they look on my shelves. I love collecting fancy and not-so-fancy bookmarks for the sole purpose of marking my place.
I still do, and always will, love books made of paper.
But it’s time for me to admit that lugging a pile of books with me when I travel (which I do) is sort of a pain in the ass, especially when I have another option. I admit, I’m slow to embrace technology. A few years ago I had no interest in owning an iPod. What for? I had my trusty portable CD player, and burning mix CDs was fun. Never mind that the thing was clunky and skipped if I knocked it around too much. But then Steve got an iPod, and I tried his out a couple of times and thought, “Well, maybe…“
Now I can’t live without my iPod classic. My entire music library is on there, and it’s never not in my purse. I play it in the car, I listen to it when I work out, I certainly can’t imagine traveling without it, and every week I’m downloading new music and making new playlists.
And so now we come to the era of the e-reader.
My birthday was Sunday, and since I’m still not too old to receive birthday money (thanks Mom!), I finally went ahead and ordered this beauty from Amazon:
The Kindle. Latest generation. Graphite gray. It’s not the sexiest piece of electronics I’ve ever seen, but I’ve decided that looks don’t matter. What matters is what it can do. What matters is that I can bring my books with me everywhere I go.
Too bad it’s on backorder! It won’t even ship until September 17th. Rats.
I honestly don’t believe that owning an e-reader will replace my desire to purchase paper books. Will I buy less paper books? Definitely. But there are authors whose work I love so much that I can’t imagine I won’t be buying their books in hardcover or paperback like I always have. Perhaps if I really love the books, I’ll own them in both electronic and paper (now tell me that isn’t being super supportive of the author and the publishing industry as a whole!). I still think my bookshelves will fill up… just more slowly.
The Kindle also supports Word and PDF documents, so you can bet that I’ll be downloading my own stuff to be read and edited right on the e-reader. Now that’s cool.
Although, here’s something to ponder: wouldn’t it be ironic if CREEP wasn’t made into an e-book?