November 26, 2007

10.3 OUNCE BOOKSHELF?

Kindle

My first reaction was love at first sight.

Then I remembered how much I love the weight of a few hundred pages, the smell of old or new, physically holding onto a single story when it's over and relishing how it touched me, seeing titles stacked on my nightstand on the bookshelf on the kitchen counter in my car by the computer, loaning my favorites to friends, improving my posture by balancing words on my head, the fluttering tickle across my thumb and the ticktickticktickticktick as pages fall against one another, spending hours at BookPeople and walking out empty-handed but feeling completely satisfied, reinforcing tattered covers and worn spines with Scotch tape, finding Charlotte's Web in a box under the bed and seeing my name in my third-grade handwriting on the inside cover.

Would I give all that up? Would I become a slave to technology? Have vinyl lovers given it up to the iPod? What happens to you in the name of convenience and portability?

It's not just about the words or the stories or the reading.

I LIKE my books. No. I LOVE my books.

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