I'm typically a very slow mover when it comes to electronics. I've been called "old soul," "technophobe" and "dinosaur," depending on how frustrated the other person was with me at the time. Still, my parents decided to take the risk and buy me a Kindle for my last birthday. (I know the article was about iPads, and I will get back there. The e-reader debate is too good to ignore though).
I love it. I've been facepalming a bit at the fact that I didn't get one earlier. We are at a stage where we can make things that have long batteries, and don't glare, and load a new page as quickly as you would flip a physical one. And that's just where we are on something like a black-and-white Kindle, which is a derivative device anyway, in a way. The fact that iPads and other tablets can do color and different formats opens up a whole other plane of reading experience.
I'm hesitant, as I mentioned in class, about some of that new possibility. One of the long-standing complaints about TV is that video and audio diminishes the need for imagination. I've heard countless arguments for reading based on escaping that spoon-fed surge of data. Imagining a book that has video feels like an intellectual step backward for me (with the possible exception of cookbooks and other how-tos, where it might be more practical to see the task performed). But the overall jump from print to digital? After some soul-searching, I've realized I'm for it.
Part of my stance has to do with the practical things suggested earlier: saving space, saving trees, the fact that while you wouldn't bring a Kindle into the bathtub, neither would you bring two or three shelves of books, or more. A lot of it, though, has to do with one of the first points the author of the article made: we are getting rid of the disposable books first.
We're all pretty romantic people here when it comes to books. That's why we're here, taking a class on how to design them. What we seem to want, as book people, is that ideal of a library stuffed with things of beauty. We want paper that goes creamy yellow, not old Crichton novel yellow(much as I love Jurassic Park, it is not aging well), and rich textures and smells, and lovely type and images. But skimming over a library shelf, there's an awful lot of cheaply made, thoughtlessly designed, unattractive or awkward or just plain boring looking books (note: their content may be fantastic--I'm just talking appearances right now). If bookmakers need to justify the need to have their book be physical, if the only books unavailable on pads or e-readers are the ones that are so exquisite that the very meaning of the book is lost without its physical presence, aren't we getting closer to that ideal library than if we insist on printing everything, whether it needs to be or not?
