Author: Lisa Kraege
I have always (nerdily) delighted in sticking my nose in the unfurled spines of books, imagining that the distinct musty smell from each book was emanating from the story itself. The pages of my favorite books are torn, folded, scribbled on, spilled on and missing. But each book is a physical reminder of the experience, sometimes the battle, that went into them.
E-book reading devices are cheating. They steal the joy out of pulling a book off the shelf, the embarrassment of carrying around “Harry Potter” at the age of twenty. The problem with e-book readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader is not only their distance and lack of interaction with the reader, it’s that they foreshadow the death of reading in general, the triumph of convenience over experience.
The Kindle allows its readers to consolidate their libraries onto a tablet-like digital device, to easily skip between “The Iliad” and “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” as if they were on iPod shuffle. While readers can potentially download everything they’ve ever wanted to read onto one interface, they’ve isolated themselves from the challenge of working with a singular book. Quantity has trumped a quality engagement. There will be no proud moment where the back cover is closed with a resounding thump, or triumphant display of the finished product in prominent visibility (“You’re reading ‘Finnigan’s Wake’?” “What can I say, I’m cultured…”).
This ability to read anything, anytime, isn’t how it works. You wouldn’t attempt to read an entire library in one go, so why is it necessary to carry around more than one book at a time? It speaks to an obsession with something that has nothing to do with books at all. The appearance of knowledge has replaced the actual pursuit – an easy and convenient solution to actually learning.
The fact that you can now download various reading applications for the iPhone proves this. How can you focus on a book while you are also twittering about how good the book you’re reading is? It shows the modern reader’s lack of dedication to engage with anything for longer than a 140-character status post.
Books won’t shatter if you drop them. You don’t have to turn them off during take-off and landing. The battery will never die. In fact, books are immortal. They will outlive you, and maybe in 1,000 years, some future anthropologist will dig up a copy of “Confessions of a Shopaholic” and it will be considered the greatest testament to life in our time. They give you a physical representation of an idea, a form to associate with words that mean so much.
A book doesn’t end with the last word. It stays with you as a physical memento of that time in your life. How would “Where the Wild Things Are” look in 2-D format, back-lit and glowing from the face of a iPhone? It wouldn’t be the same. Some things are better done in person – like breaking up, having sex and reading.
Lisa Kraege is a junior ECLS major. She can be reached at lkraege@oxy.edu.
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