“Almost a Book”

Regular readers of The Book Maven know that I am rather fond of my e-reading device. I’ve received a bit of flack for mentioning it often. I promise not to write about it too often here, but I had to mention an article that I read this weekend.

E-readers have drawbacks. I’d like to write a piece that would get lots and lots and lots of eyeballs about what those drawbacks are, because the ones I’ve noticed haven’t been mentioned in any of the reviews I’ve read over the past 12 months or so since the one I own came out — even, and perhaps especially, since Oprah endorsed it.

However, in this week’s NYT Magazine, The Medium columnist The Medium Column on the Amazon Kindle that will get all the eyeballs my earlier posts about it didn’t, and she neatly encapsulates why the device has an allure:

“In short, you get absorbed when reading on the Kindle. You lose hours to reading novels in one sitting. You sit up straighter, energized by new ideas and new universes. You nod off, periodically, infatuated or entranced or spent. And yet the slight connection to the Web still permits the (false, probably, but nonetheless reassuring) sense that if the apocalypse came while you were shut away somewhere reading, the machine would get the news from Amazon.com and find a way to let you know. Anything short of that, though, the Kindle leaves you alone.”

In short, in my own words, Heffernan explains how something she sees as “almost a book” makes her more of a reader, because she’s able to take it places and access content so easily.

Of course, you can take a book places and access its content very easily indeed, which is why such a simple yet perfectly designed tool has lasted over so many centuries. However, as I ran around NYC last week for a couple of days with too much baggage, I was incredibly glad that all of my reading material — newspapers, favorite blogs, and books — was tucked into one simple package. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty convenient.