OP ED: THE KINDLE

My problem, it turns out, is not that it will ruin the delightful experience of holding a book in your hands, the new book (or old book) smell, the scribblings in the margin and so on, exchanging all of that for yet another glowing screen.  Any nostalgia over this disappears the second you are able to hold (a free copy of) Anna Karenina in one hand and barely feel the weight, and then adjust the font size and spacing to your liking.  Nor is the problem that it renders meaningless the joy of hunting down some forgotten treasure in a musty old bookstore.  This is replaced by the satisfaction of being able to buy any book in the universe instantly FROM THE COMFORT OF YOUR OWN HOME.  I feel sad for the sweet old men who will lose their sweet little bookshops, of course, just like I felt sad for all those adorable small town record stores that no longer exist.  But very few markets can sustain themselves on sympathy alone.  Life goes on.

My problem is that unlike the CD or the tape or the eight track or the record player, books have been around for centuries.  They are the keepers of cultural memory. Excavators can pour over 2,000 year old scrolls to decipher the ancient past, but what if they don't have access to the Amazon cloud?  Of course they won't have access to the Amazon Cloud.  When we trust nearly all of our cultural creations to devices that are guaranteed to be outmoded within 10 years, how will the distant future know a thing about us?  Does no one else care about this?  We are living in an absolute explosion of information and artistic expression (admittedly owing precisely to the digitization of all of these forms).  Most of this is probably better left to the wayside, sure, but even if we agree to continue adding a few choice physical books to the Library of Congress year after year, there will no doubt be hoards of great works forever forgotten, as popular opinion has never been a very reliable judge of greatness.  What about every artist or philosopher whose brilliance wasn't realized until he was decades dead?  How many geniuses will be lost in the electronic shuffle?  I realize there have probably already been countless geniuses lost to history, thanks to some other sort of shuffle.  Still, it saddens me.

But such is the passage of time.  The kindle is out there, and it is devastatingly awesome.  There's no taking it back.  I always thought when it got cheap enough, I would buy a kindle for frivolous beach reading and keep copies of all of my very favorite books for my personal library, thus doing my part to continue creating demand for the good old physical book.  One night of playing with this little guy, and I am afraid I may never buy a physical book again.  Gone the way of the dinosaurs, as they say.  Time rolls on, crushing all sorts of wonderful things in its wake, making way for new wonderful things.  I would like to put in my request, though, that someone look into this, and make sure as much content as possible is being preserved for posterity, somewhere besides a computer.  Please and thank you.

PS - Who wrote this?