nostalgia
I've been meaning to write a post about nostalgia for awhile - ever since Kevin started raving about the new Amazon Kindle. I'm sure that the Kindle is a very sophisticated and innovative device, but I still find it hard to reconcile with my fondness for a good book.
Kevin would argue that the genius of the Kindle is that it takes a good book and makes it more accessible. The kindle is more portable and less resource (e.g., paper) intensive. Despite my tendency to be swayed by arguments rooted in sustainability, I still find it difficult to get excited by the Kindle.
A good book is more than content. Dog-eared pages, musty smells, stains, cover art, font, notes on the inside cover, memories. All of these things add to the content and contribute to the book-reading experience. I derive more enjoyment from reading second-hand books as compared to new ones because the books themselves, physically, tell a story too. And, a rebuttal to Kevin's green argument, even paperbacks can be sustainable if reused!
For the most part, I pass books along to friends when I've read them. But there are exceptions. I have a box of favorite books in a box in Montreal, in the basement. The box is among other boxes of personal treasures - similar to the nostalgia boxes described by Lily. I want to keep these books because they mean something more to me than words on a page. They resonated with me and I want to hold on to them for posterity.
Elaine was keeping some of the books from my childhood and I hope they're still around. There's a copy of Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss that has blood splattered across a few pages - I got a nosebleed once when I was reading it (actually, I think I was listening to the audio tape that came with the book - the narrator's voice "Would you eat them in a box? Would you eat them with a fox?" still echoes in my mind). These books are associated with fond memories of bedtime stories and rainy days. A few years ago, Elaine gave me a used copy of a Richard Scary book that she found at a book sale. Apparently I loved the book as a child and seeing it at the sale reminded my mom of me.
The Kindle can't compete from a nostalgia standpoint and, for the same reasons I was reluctant to make the switch from film to digital, I don't think I'll be buying one anytime soon. In addition, I'm not convinced that the Kindle offers improvements to paper books in the same way digital photography did in comparison to film. Paying for film, waiting to get photos developed, weeding out bad shots on the spot, and sharing photos more readily are all benefits offered by digital. I have a hard time thinking of many issues associated with conventional books that the Kindle will solve. Most of the books I read are already rather portable. Perhaps the Kindle will corner the market for text books.
