Jason Epstein, co-founder of the New York Review of Books:

"Try to read a serious book on that," he said of the Kindle. "You won't be able to, I don't think."

This is true.

...

"The real things that will be lost will be the discoveries that can be made in a bookstore, that wonderful wandering where you find precisely what you didn't know you were looking for."

Walter Kirn: "I think that what people who are mourning the book are really mourning is reading. They see the book as a totem of their melancholy over the disappearance of solid reading culture.

I've written on this topic myself a number of times, both here and at home, so this is right up my alley, so to speak.

I'm sympathetic to "fetishizing ink and paper", and absolutely believe there's a meaningful experiential difference between reading a well made book and reading something on a screen made of plastic. I think it's largely aesthetic, not fully integral to the meaning or validity of the work, but that's not at all to say it's not important. Aesthetic considerations allow function to transcend and create pleasure. A teapot is merely a metal container for boiling water, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy the experience of having tea far more when using a well designed one. So for books.

I suppose my main concern with some of the views expressed here is the notion that the advent of electronic readers must necessarily see the demise of the paper novel. Technology doesn't typically cause the outright eradication of older forms. What it does is relegate them to niches... it places them into the category of collectors items, of art pieces. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that's necessarily a fabulous solution. Nonetheless I have hope that where a market for paper-bound books exists, then so the books will exist as well. Perhaps in the future all such will be custom made, works of skill by independent bookbinders (where the content license has already been purchased as a separate item). Of course, this removes them from the hands of the general public, for the most part; this represents a loss, no doubt, perhaps a grievous one. Still, I've read dozens of books that I felt no particular attachment to, physically. These (which aren't literature, as one of the quoted authors suggests) are better suited for eBooks. Of course, there are a couple hundred volumes that I feel very strongly about, arrayed on my shelves in a way that, I admit, brings me a great deal of comfort and perhaps even happiness thereby. But do I really need them *all*? Not really.

The proposition made by this author, that distaste for the Kindle and it's ilk is a proxy for a feeling of loss of a "solid reading culture" may be accurate, but if so I think it's also misguided. Firstly, I reject the argument that reading Shakespeare on a well designed (read, not yet created, and definitely not a blackberry) eBook reader necessarily robs it of it's "truth" or "integrity" even if it does rob it of some of it's pleasure. Meanwhile I do think that such a device (characteristics of which are discussed at more length in my link above) could offer a lot of people -- people without access to scholars, for example -- far better access to literature and a greater understanding of what they're reading than they could otherwise expect. In that sense, this technology trend may well lead to a revitalized culture of literacy.

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