I'll be the first to admit that I'm an electronics whore. I'm the kind of man who can spend an unnerving amount of time perving over a catalogue of gadgetry, and without even the need to buy anything. It's just circuit board porn as far as I'm concerned. I lust after the new inventions that come out and wonder how we ever coped without GPS and tea-making facilities in our mobile phones. But it seems that even I have my limits. Mr. Soanes has been mulling over the purchase of one of those new Kindle or Sony reader things, which allow you to read books on a special hand-held 'paper-like' screen. The Sony PSP is introducing a reader function soon which allows you to do a similar thing. I should be moist at the very prospect. After all they involve the net, screens, buttons and lights. And yet I find myself left cold by these toys.
I have a colossal amount of proper books sitting just to my left as I type this. And other than the pleasure of reading them, the value of ownership is very important to me. I like the weight of a book in my hands, the cover art, the smell of the pages and the way it looks when it's put back on the shelf after I've finished with it. Once you own a book you need nothing else other than a pair of eyes and some light. There are no battery issues, or upgrade problems nor technical drawbacks. The book is a perfect piece of technology that I don't believe can ever be improved upon.
If we ever get to the stage where we just download books to a gadget, I think we will lose something. A fitting analogy would be the transition from LP to MP3. When I was younger I had a collection of vinyl, with great art, and a wonderful feel to it. Often they came in gatefold format and you felt an actual affection for these inanimate objects. Now, in the days where your record collection amounts to a bunch of files on a hard disk, I can't help feeling that something has been lost along the way, and I hope that a similar fate doesn't befall books. To me one of life's great pleasures is to be had whilst sitting in a comfy chair, with a book in one hand and a cuppa in the other. And I realise that whilst I love computers and the internet rather more than is strictly healthy, some pieces of technology were perfected long before the word 'byte' had even been invented.
12 comments:
In my semi-defence (not that I need to defend myself to the likes of you, meladdigan), I'm only planning to use the reader for hefty reference tomes which I wouldn't have any attachment to anyway - for ease of carrying and searching and the like. A supplement to my paper-laden shelves, as it were.
And I agree about books being one of the forms of communication that need little upgrade or modernisation; after all, as Groucho Marx put it, "outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read".
J
Oh I wasn't having a go, I was just mulling over the general idea.
Yes you were, doing me down again, trying to dent my self-esteem so badly that I never seek love from anyone else. Well, it won't work. I watched an episode of Ricki about people like you.
Besides, mother was right about you.
J
Maaarrriiaaahhhh !!!!!!!!!
The two of you should get together and write a sitcom. You're a hoot. Really. Funnier than most anything on TV.
I won't work with him again, he nicks all my worst ideas and passes them off as his.
J
Oooooh, get you..........
And you are complaining about that, Mr. Soanes?!!! It's brilliant that he can sort out the worst ones. I'd love someone to claim my worst ideas. As it is, I end up taking the blame for them.
You see the way he treats me Debby ?
Yes, I do, Stu. Why do you hang around with that sort anyway? Why don't you just come claim all my worst ideas as your own? Really would get me out of a lot of hot water. And you could just Stu.
Hey I've got enough bad ideas of my own to deal with, without taking on even more !
I completely agree with you on this and have resisted the Kindle myself. I can buy a book for less than a download most of the time and there's no replacing the paper in your hand. Plus as a bed reader, I think it's a big mistake not to include backlighting!
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