"This is the future of book reading. It will be everywhere." Michael Lewis
USED AND NEW: Available from $349.00
Availability: Expected to ship in 11 to 13 weeks. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
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When the people at work started talking about the Kindle as though it were the holy grail, I took some time to figure out what I thought about this new phenomenon. Then I began to see it all over the city. People sipping coffees in parks, scrolling down their saucy romance novels. Men in business suits, scrolling down their Wall Street Journals. Children poking at words to have their definitions pop out at them immediately. I don't know if it's the insane accessibility that throws me or if it's the fact that everyone seems to be picking this up and thinking nothing of it. I guess this must be how music lovers felt at the onset of the iPod. Yeah, you'll have any book that you want in front of your eyes for only $9.99 each with a simple click, but you have to pay $349 first. It will only take 30 seconds after that simple click, but you have to wait 11 to 13 weeks for your Kindle to arrive at your doorstep first. How about going to a half-price bookstore two blocks away? Or have we become so lazy that we can't even take a leisurely walk to give patronage to the Barnes and Noble or the ... library? Yes, the dictionary feature is nice, but what happened to flipping through that old volume that is getting dusty on our shelves? Most importantly, in a time where most of us spend a good portion of our days scrolling, clicking, dragging and dropping, our eyes slaves to the screen, don't we need a break? Don't we need real bound paper in our hands, in our laps? Doesn't it feel nice to get our eyes off that glossy abyss for an hour or two a day, to pick up something that weighs however many pages are in it, to lick our fingertips and turn the pages in anticipation of whathappensnext? Don't we love to look at our stacks of books that have creases in the bindings and dog ears squished in between the leafs and scribblings and ideas scrawled by our own hand in the margins?
It's green, yes. Oprah endorsed it, true. But until they invent a Kindle complete with the sweet smell of the paper within a book, I'm sticking to my old fashioned ways.
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