The shortcomings of ebooks have been repeatedly noted, so why do Amazon, Sony, Apple and Google waste all their precious resources trying to make them work? Do they honestly think that book readers will forever dump the book and all its physical glory for a sterile, one-dimensional, void-of-context, slick and shiny gadget? I suspect some will, but will the numbers be high enough to render all this effort worthwhile?
Don't get me wrong, I love gadgets as much as the next geek; I'm an early adopter of many of them. But experiencing books requires time commitment spanning several hours or days, focus and immersion. I've yet to see an electronic object that lends itself to satisfy these requirements.
Our brains have been rewired to view gadgets as a source of instant satisfaction. Tivos are made for instant viewing and commercial skipping; Smartphones are made for instant communication; GPSs are made for instant orientation and TVs are made for instant information. Our need for instant satisfaction goes beyond gadgets into other facets of life. We expect the economy to recover the moment we pour money into it and peace to prevail the moment a treaty is signed. We expect our young to grow quickly and our old to die quickly. Even within the world of gadgets, the faster ones reign while the rest evanesce. Fortunately, and much to the chagrin of our expectations, there are things in life that cannot be hastened, and the art of reading is one of them (unless of course you're willing to forego comprehension.)
I do have Stanza and Classics installed on my iPhone and every once in a while I open them up and read a passage or two from a random book. They're good for passing the time standing in the checkout line at Gelson's or waiting in the examination room at your doctor's office. If the wait gets longer, I invariably find myself opening other applications like Facebook or Tweetie just because I can and my attention span with this device in hand dwindles to mere seconds if not non-existent. After I check my Facebook notifications and tweet about the long wait I'm enduring, I put the phone down, hardly ever remembering the book or the passage I was reading.
And I read a book every three days.
I think a good book is worth the few trees that fall giving birth to it. In the end, the more people staying home, enjoying a good book, the less people driving around in cars, the less poison is released in the air, the less trees fall wastefully. It's simple, really. All I know is that I will mourn the day I go up to my favorite author and say, "I love your work, now do you mind syncing your vcard with my tablet? Thanks so much. That really means a lot to me."
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