I remember the good old days of vinyl LPs and what a pain in the neck those big slabs of plastic were. I was one of the first on board with digital music, I’ve never been one of those people that think a good LP sounds better than a good mp3. In this case, the delivery method was improved. With books, well, I’m not so sure.
I don’t mind reading blogs, most of them are pretty short. Reading full length books is another story. To be fair, I don’t own a Kindle or a Nook or an Ipad-but laptops and PCs were made with reading mind as well.
Issac Asimov wrote an essay on the perfect entertainment medium-it would be portable, easy to use, require no power, and only work when you looked at it-in other words, a book.
I like going to Libraries and looking at all the books. I usually end up taking home an armload of titles. My interests span a pretty wide range and I am always amazed at the books I find on library shelves. There are times when I find whole sections of the library I would like to take home, but I seldom do any more. I am not a fan of that feeling of guilt that comes with an unread book.
And that is my real problem with eBooks. Back in the day when CDs where the hot new technology that was going to make everyone a Rhodes Scholar-lots of people sold CDs with libraries on them. These were CDs filled with Classics, Cookbooks, and so on. These were not audio books. These were text files and each CD might have a hundred or more titles on it. You can still find these at Dollar Stores once in a while. Know how many of those books on CD I read? Hmm, none.
So for me, carrying around a hundred books doesn’t mean much if I never get around to reading them. The real technology I am waiting for is the one from The Matrix, where you have a book downloaded into your brain in seconds and the information is instantly usable. Of course, I never saw Trinity reading just for the fun of it.
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