After hearing about e-Readers, I've been trying to decide how badly I want one. The reading habits that spurred me towards librarianship in high school gradually evaporated as I began to turn towards graphic novels in 2004, and after four and half years of associating reading with school work and carrying my customary hatred of schoolwork over into my life, I'm criminally underread.
The biggest obstacle to returning to the literate fold is getting books. My apartment is tiny and I have almost no room for book storage. So getting an e-reader seems like a good idea. The logical next step, right? On the other hand, it's difficult to read things like the comic above and not find yourself smirking meaningfully. There is an assumed holiness about the codex, the book, that makes replacing it feel strange. It doesn't help that as an owner of books there is a lot to be said about the parallel economy one uses to move them back and forth long after they've fallen out of print, or that I distinctly remember passages from dystopian novels where characters would cradle computer screens and pine meaningfully for the days of paper books.
Even aside from any psychological or superstitious reasons to value books over e-readers (which are especially ridiculous from someone who claims that Content is king), the e-readers have the same practical problems that make me wary when it comes to other electronics. If I drop my book at the beach, I'm a little disappointed because my book is soggy. At worst, I have to replace it with another copy. If I drop my e-reader in the water, my whole library is obliterated. To paraphrase Jerry Holkins: "It's as if you murdered all your favorite authors." Obviously it's recoverable in theory, but that's what they said about my iTunes music before my laptop caught fire. My house is significantly less prone to catching fire and falling to ruin than any electronic device I've ever seen, and I've never accidentally mislaid my entire collection of A Series of Unfortunate Events while changing terminals at LAX.
My point is that all the convenience of an e-book, well sold to me by the group discussing it, vanishes with my proclivity for losing such an device. And the cost benefit isn't there--even if books were significantly cheaper with a Kindle, I simply don't deal frequently enough in them to justify the purchase of a $140 device. Ignoring textbooks, I have purchased approximately forty books for my reading pleasure in the last four years. Most of them were graphic novels, but all of them were purchased to be shared. Hell, when I was in High School I ran a small psuedo-library loaning graphic novels to friends.
So I think I'll stick to my codex for a while, thank you kindly.
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