Things You Cannot/Should Not/Should Be Embarrassed To Do with a Kindle

I would guess that by now most people have heard of Amazon's Kindle, which basically amounts to reading made lazy and dull. Frankly, I think it's another slap in the face from a technological modernity that assumes we, consumers and - more importantly - human beings, no longer possess the patience, or have a strong enough attention span, or, I don't know, maybe we no longer have formidable enough tendons in our hands to flip a few hundred pages.

Whatever the case may be, Kindle is out there and it probably won't be hurrying off any time too soon. And I'm reasonable enough to say that perhaps it may serve a practical purpose for some people in certain situations. Me personally, I can't think of a time when, one, I'd ever purchase such a waste of money, and two, even if I had when I'd actually sit down and e-flip through e-pages to get my e-enjoyment. But for the casual Kindler, caught up and frenetic with this high-tech climate of ours, I do think that there are most assuredly a handful of situations and ways of reading a book, which to be clear is an adhesively bound collection of pages with printed words and a vaguely sentimental fragrance - in case anyone's forgotten - that you simply can't recreate by way of Kindle. And if you do, you should know that besides the carelessness of doing so with such an expensive item, that sneaking suspicion of yours that people are laughing at you? That's not a suspicion. We are. We think you're foolish as hell.

1. Public Transportation 

The one thing I've never worried about being held up for whilst riding to and fro the various places I go is my book. I can imagine the absurdity of the situation. Held at gunpoint, the feral-eyed man demanding that I "hand over the paperback...right now."

Now a Kindle? You're talking about something that's closer to a grand than it is to 100 dollars, let alone the standard 13 or so you'd pay for a new paperback. You're talking primo resale value. Slap that thing on eBay or sell to a ne'er-the-wiser friend, or whoever. That's not a book you're carrying. That's a capitalist's variation of literature. That, in point of fact, is not literature, it's a mechanical symbol of money. It's a slab of technology that can be stolen and resold rather easily. 

But I'm pretty sure no one is going to be taking my dog-eared copy of Absurdistan, the one with the Diet Coke stain and the corner of the cover somewhat torn off.

2. The Beach

For safety reasons alone it seems like a silly idea. I certainly wouldn't want to get sand wedged somewhere into the cracks. It may be that I tend to protect investments, but whenever I do occasionally take my camera to the beach, I'm sure to keep it inside either its protective case or a Ziploc bag, far from the sand and out of the sun for extended periods of time. The same goes for a phone. The same goes for any electronic device. Having spent a serious amount of money on it, I'm wary of sending it into ruinous situations. 

But again, with the Kindle you're pretty much forced to have it out there, lying limp in your hands under the sun and getting sand blown into it, let alone water or whatever beverage you've opted for your vacation. I don't imagine the Kindle being all too favorable to a beer spillage. Is the constant barrage of the sun on ots faceplate even good for it? I'd wager not.

This alone pales in comparison to how foolish you're going to look. It's like the guy you see sprawled out on the towel with his bluetooth clipped to his ear, yammering away in a manner that leaves his sanity in quesiton. Go. Leave the beach. Go back to your room. Hole yourself away. What are you on vacation for? What have you gone to the beach for, a spot of the earth that is pretty much naturally limited to sand and water? I go to get away, hence the idea behind vacation. A book can only aid in that process, by taking you away. Sure. The Kindle has wireless capability. Email capability. You can browse the web. Great. Wonderful. That's exactly what I want on the beach. Because when I'm sitting there listening to the roar of waves and delightful shouts of young folk, the first thing I think of is, "I wonder if anyone's sent me an email."

I doubt many people will take their low-riding beach chair down towards the shore where the waves are crashing and pull out their Kindle, what with an unpredictable tide, kids running around splashing. Yet with a regular old boring book, it's no big deal. A Kindle is more convenient? You're on a beach. What do you need celerity and convenience for? Slooow down. Take a paperback. Apply sunscreen. Relax. Take your responsibilities and shut them away. One of the best parts of reading on the beach is much later, pulling up that book back at the hotel or your house, and smelling the admixture of sun tan lotion, cocoa butter, salt watery air, and the sun-dried texture of the pages. Good luck finding that with a Kindle. 

3. Romantic Excursions 

I'm not even going to move beyond a cursory explanation of why pulling out your Kindle to quote a phrase, a passage, or a sentence that particularly moved you to a loved one is as lame as you can get. For your sake I hope they keep you, if only for amusement's sake.

4. Used Book Store Postpartum Depression

What, oh what would I do without the completely happenstance discovery of some dim little mom and pop used bookstore that smells like a rain-swept apartment and in whose alcoves I might find a very shady but no less book-interested person to schmooze with, where paperbacks cost me little more than a dollar and brand new hardcovers often come as cheap 13 bones? Books out of print. Books out of translation. Books with pre-scrawled margins from a previously smitten reader(s) that I find nothing short of magical. It's a reminder that, Yes! People are still inspired by the written word, and judging from the double underline and three exclamation points following this last sentence, in very emphatic ways. Locate for me that kind of jubilation on an e-page of a Kindle. Still waiting.

5. Durability.

When I get home, I drop my messenger bag to the floor, allowing my book(s) to collide with the wooden surface. A dull thud follows. Sometimes I even accidentally step on it. I could dance on them if I wanted to. There's no damage to my book. I have no fear cycling through the city with it bouncing around wildly. Even in a crash, I'm still not worried. There won't be any damage to my book. On a crowded lightrail I have no problem stuffing myself into a seat and in the act of doing so smushing my book against the backrest. There won't be any damage to it short of a bent page. If I fall asleep in bed reading and the book falls to the floor, there won't be any damage to the book. If a book is so abhorrently awful that I have to fling it at the wall, cursing it into the diminutive list of books unfinished, so be it. No damage to the book, unless a book has feelings. Sometimes when I'm unloading my gear at the end of a day I'll toss my book across the room towards the sofa or the bed or the chair or anywhere else that's cushiony. If I miss? No big deal. How well the Kindle fares against all of the above, I wouldn't be so confident. 

I could go on. And on. The fact of the matter is the Kindle, while it may not be the "end of books" as some go on to doomsdayishly call it, is at the very least a boring, dull, soulless, and unflattering way to go about reading. Why? Why Kindle? Okay. You can have numerous things at your hands to read at one given time, but let's be honest. I'm speaking merely of books. How many books are you reading at once? How many newspapers at once? What newspaper is even worth reading these days? I've yet to hear a compelling reason why reading books as books is so difficult and/or obsolete? You can't physically read a Kindle faster than a book, can you? True, you might lose a fraction of a second every time to turn the page, and I suppose in a 24 hour day those seconds might add up. And gosh, that's a lot of time to lose, isn't it?

Put down the Kindle. Pick up a book. It's better and you know it.

Addendum:

With both the recent release of Amazon's new Kindle Big Screen and a keen suggestion by a friend of mine, if I'm to be honest with myself, I've got some addenda to make. 

6. Multiply everything I said by ten, because that's what Amazon just did. 

As of Wednesday, May 6, I believe, Amazon released their new Big Screen Kindle, which I suppose is great if you like really large and bulky items. Although, I should say, it isn't supposed to weigh all that much, supposedly around that of a paperback book. Nevertheless, it's an enormous piece of plastic to hold in front of your face. With the screen coming in around 9.7 inches, you're closing in on a foot of screen space. This is done, reportedly, to make reading newspapers and textbooks easier, thanks to the now enlarged screen which I guess will accommodate those trades known for their wide pages. 

I read someone say this may be the last chance of survival for Newspapers. With the size of the screen you won't have to pan, zoom, or really do anything but stare into the electric ether, hope that it isn't secretly frying out your rods and cones or slowly poisoning you with some kind of cancer, and read. I, for one, think a good way to save the newspapers is remind them that they're to be reporting on the news, not creating faux-news by spreading ideological drivel, which is neither well-written nor compelling, or even that convincing. And if textbook companies really think students are going to be reading them, they have a whole other set of delusions of granduer they need to hash out. I wish them best of luck. Not to mention that you can't sell back e-purchased Kindle textbooks to the school store for a quick few hundred dollars to use on last-semester hurrahs of overindulgent and irresponsible behavior. Wired magazine has a good article that busts the Kindle myth, particularly among college students, who in a poll didn't give the most reassuring numbers to Amazon's hopes that this bigger is better version is going to accomplish all that they assume it will.

 

The kicker? These bad boys will run you around $495 dollars, a price which begs the question, "why not just charge me $500, you motherfuckers?" Hey, if you can really justify spending that kind of money on something that, like all high-paced technology, you will probably at some point have to replace and/or upgrade, go for it. I just bought a used paperback in the city from a rather charming Ukrainian store owner for 75 cents. 

7. Personal Libraries

Prompted by the wise suggestion of a friend, I wonder what now becomes of the personal libraries? Even amongst the ruling elite, with their impressive libraries that all their friends know they've never bothered to read, it's still impressive nonetheless, no? There's something about a number of oak bookshelves stocked to full capacity with and endless cache of books, all of various colors and fonts and scripts and titles. 

You walk into someone's library, it's like entering a port of their personality. A library is an avid reader's inner sanctum. It's where they think, absorb, contemplate, and it's where they unwind after a spell spent out there in the complicated world. You get a much better sense of who this person is based on that. You might be wrong about the person and the library might be an enormous facade, but generally you can tell. Being immersed in a library, there's something historically and humanistically powerful. What surrounds us there are the written words of men and women over who knows how many hundreds and thousands of years of human history, words they put every ounce of brainpower, intellect, emotion, and wit they had. On the other hand, someone shows you their conveniently categorized electronic lists of accumulated titles, some purchased honestly, many pirated, you don't get that same sense of being welcomed into someone's private quarters or the vast historical awareness. It's much less underwhelming and actually kind of lame. No. Correction. It's very lame. Libraries have an aroma, a taste, a personality, and a body that is all there own. A Kindle has, what, a big hard drive?

I won't go into depth, because it probably isn't all too necessary, but I think this even extends to public libraries. Those big, cavernous edifices housing books for free. Some great times were had by me and my overactive imagination as a boy in the library after being dropped off there for the day. Guilty as I am nowadays, I don't utilize the library, though there's one a few blocks from where I could get any and every book I ever need without charge. Just try to grasp the logic behind this: There's a place that's letting you read books for free and you're not using it. 

But hey, who am I? Just a guy with an opinion. Sometimes, side by side pictures present the case and let the viewer slam the gavel. So have it. Which would you prefer to be doing?