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Tuesday, April 26, 2011

eReaders

I never thought I would switch.  For years I have held an average of 80 books a year in my hands.  All that time sitting in a library has given me a fetish about librarians.  The electronic medium doesn’t have that smell a bookstore carries with it.  It loses those great moments when you slip into a New Orleans secondhand store with a massive hangover to find a gem, and the smell of The Strand bookshop where I found my coveted treasure in a signed copy of Mark Strands collected poems.  But eBooks have something else.  The biggest sin someone can commit to me is writing in the margins of books.  I could never bring myself to soil someone else’s page.  Now I can leave notes everywhere.  I can mark up a bible and highlight funny lines of a Christopher Moore book.  When I finish one book the other is just a click away.  Hard to find books are becoming a thing of the past and things are only going to get worse.  I didn’t think I would like eReaders, and now I would slit a person’s throat if they messed up my kindle.

1 comment:

  1. Dammit DL, you've touched one of my biggest ongoing struggles. I've resisted getting involved in Kindles and the like simply because I've continued to (foolishly) hold onto the romanticized image of the printed word. It's becoming clearer to me, now more than ever, that I must stop being stubborn and embrace this cold, digital future of literature.

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