I Will Give Up My Books When They Pry Them From My Cold Dead Hands...

Last week, Amazon unveiled its new e-Book to a lot of hoopla. The Kindle is supposed to do to books what the iPod did to music. The biggest difference I see is that music has made a natural progression toward the digital world, books largely have not. Sure, we do a lot of reading online now, but not for escapism. You just can’t curl up with a warm computer screen. Well, you can, but it isn’t very enjoyable.

Call me a Luddite if you want, but I am no technological neophyte. I love my iPod. I love my laptop. I will love it when we all travel around in flying cars and jet packs in the not-to-distant future. But I will NEVER give up my books.

Why am I so down on e-Books? It’s not so much what they are, but what they aren’t. They aren’t books.

I love the smell of books, new and old. I love the way the pages feel when I turn them – especially the feeling of accomplishment I get when I turn the last page. I love getting lost in a good book – forgetting my surroundings and setting my imagination free.

I even enjoy the peripheral things associated with books. I love buying books at the bookstore or going to the library to borrow them. I love the way you can curl back the cover on a paperback. I love the way hardbacks look on the bookshelf.

You don’t need power to read a book – trust me, I’ve spent many blackouts reading books by flashlight; not to mention those nights when I was a kid and stayed up way past my bedtime reading under the covers. The Kindle has up to 30 hours of power on a single charge, but you don’t need to charge a book at all. And you don’t need a user guide to work one. Any two-year-old knows how to use a book.

If I really like a book, I enjoy picking it up again and re-reading it cover to cover, or just the best parts. And if I really love it, I will loan it out to a friend or family member. You can’t do that with e-Books. They’re proprietary, which means their licensing is more restrictive than iTunes. You can’t download a book and copy it onto a CD for future storage because you might want to pass it along to a friend. Even if you figured out a way to do it, under the licensing for the Kindle, that would be called piracy – stealing. That just rubs me the wrong way. If I buy a book, it’s my book. I should be allowed to do with it whatever I want. Even loan it to my friend.

Sure there are advantages to e-Books, namely that they don’t require paper. Plus, they are cheaper than a new hardback. There is also the advantage that you can store dozens and dozens of books in one unit at the same time. Imagine the benefit for college students who don’t have to lug around gigantic textbooks.

But that isn’t reading for pleasure. Until they figure out a way to replicate the sheer joy of reading a book, I’ll stick with paper.