I am totally predictable in the mornings. I make coffee, turn on CNN, drink juice, scan the night’s email. When the coffee’s ready, I go to the New York Times online. There’s a whole litany of sites that follow: Slate’s news wrap, the Daily Beast for fun, the Guardian for books. . . but this morning I got no further than the news item that Amazon was offering a free Kindle app for iPhones. Way before 7 AM I downloaded it. Zip, zip.

There’s a button on the top of the app that says “Get Books.” Press it and you’re told to go to the Amazon/Kindle website. I did this, on my iPhone. Now, what book do I want?

My first choice was a novel called Adiós, Hemingway because a friend recommended it. Nope, they didn’t have it. Although that wasn’t terribly unexpected, it threw me for a loop. You don’t know me, but you must realize that I work for a book review magazine. On any given day, there are hundreds of books all over the floor of my office. At home, there’s a Post Office box next to the door full of books I’ve taken the time to read a chapter or two of, and discarded. On the shelves there are four generations of books read and saved and reread. I don’t have enough room to keep books that won’t be reread. How many books are up there? I don’t know the number but I know what I’ve got.

And I also know what I don’t need, what I’m not interested in spending $9.99 on, the going-price of most books in the Kindle store. I mean, I like to read mysteries as much as anyone, but $9.99 seems a wasteful, selfish amount to spend on a non-tangible, one-time-only book. At least if I buy the hardcopy, I can give it away to someone, and they can give it away to someone.

So what would I spend $9.99 on? Something I’d like to keep with me. A reference. For example, a few weeks ago I splurged on the Oxford American Dictionary app for my iPhone. I love it. I use it every day. Surely there must be something else, maybe something I’ve got in my library.

I get up with my coffee and stand in front of my bookshelves for a bit—what would be something more useful than Google to keep on my phone?

How about John Emsley’s Nature’s Building Blocks? That’d be fun. I key in the name. Nope. Sorry. There’s a book by John Emsley (same guy?) called The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison, and there’s also one (same guy) called Vanity, Vitality, & Virility: The Science Behind the Products You Love to Buy, but I’m not buying.

Okay, how about The Oxford Book of Military History. That could be useful for when I’m in waiting rooms filled with Good Housekeeping magazines. I key in the name. Nope. There’s U.S. Military History for Dummies (never understood why anyone would buy those books), and there are really odd (and suspicious) titles like The Art of Insurgency: American Military Policy & the Failure of Strategy in Southeast Asia. Who’s reading that, and where? Or even stranger, Marching Under Darkening Skies: The American Military & the Impending Urban Ops Threat. Wow. Are Special Forces guys with Kindles killing time reading this stuff in the field?

It’s getting pretty late by now. I need to get dressed and go to work. What am I going to do? All right, let’s just key in “Oxford” and see what comes up.

Lots. All sorts of weird “handbooks” on oncology, international relations, ethical theory. . . Wait! Here’s something. How about The Dictionary of Modern Quotations? That’d work. That’d be useful and fun. $9.99.

I hit the “one click” button and since I’ve already signed up for the app, Amazon recognizes my device. Apparently, if you have both a Kindle and an iPhone, your purchases will upload to both and will keep track of where you are in your readings no matter which device you use.

The WiFi at my house wasn’t working this morning, and there’s no 3G network in northern Michigan. Even so, it only took a couple of minutes for the book to show up in the Kindle app. I was immediately amused that the familiar Oxford font shows up on my phone. And the table of contents is a series of links—that’s good. Let’s try “Last Words.”

1    Bugger Bogner.

King George V. (1865 – 1936) on his deathbed in 1936, when someone remarked ‘Cheer up, your Majesty, you will soon be at Bognor again’; alternatively, a comment made in 1929, when it was proposed that the town be named Bognor Regis on account of the king’s convalescence there after a serious illness
K. Rose King George V (1983); see Last Words 190:5


I’d call this a success, wouldn’t you?

Back in early summer, a Sony Reader came through the office. Actually, it had been in the office for some time, but was hidden in a cupboard. Ignoring the obvious insinuation of its abandonment, I snatched it up, eager to download some free books from Project Gutenburg. This will be great for traveling, I announced to the office. Uh huh, they replied, without conviction.

Luddites, I thought. Remember when the first digital typewriters came out? You could see about 16 characters on a tiny screen embedded just above the keyboard, and as long as you made changes there, it wouldn’t print on the special coated paper. Sounds laborious and nitpicky nowadays, but I was so happy to be rid of the Olivetti; its racket, its physicality. The digital was like a whisper of footsteps accompanying the smoke from my cigarettes.

All right, so I take the Sony Reader home, I download a couple of Sherlock Holmes stories from Gutenberg.org, I plug the Reader into my Mac…. Hah! I should have known better. No Mac support.

But, I’m used to this kind of stuff. I’ve had Macs since 1989. Easy enough to Google “mac support for sony reader” and download some free software. (What gets me is, if it’s so easy (free), then why don’t these gadget-makers include it in their software package in the first place?) That done, I’m hooked up… But can I upload my new books from Gutenberg? No. Need more freeware for that. Finally, I’m all loaded and ready to test drive.

Huge disappointment. Sherlock Holmes is visible on the Reader, but only barely. The type is miniscule no matter how much I magnify. This means that I’m stuck with the partial books that came loaded on the Reader, or I’ve got to go to Sony website and pay for their exclusive product. But wait! I can’t, because it doesn’t support Macs.

A couple of weekends ago, I was in a BestBuy with my thirteen-year-old. I needed a powercord for my iPod and he was browsing. He liked the new Sony PSP where he could play games, listen to music, watch movies. But can he move his iTunes files over to the PSP? No. Can he even plug the thing into a Mac? No.

Honestly, I don’t understand this intolerance and exclusivity among gadget makers. Google seems to have the right idea with the announcement a couple of weeks ago of its Open Handset Alliance software that will run on any phone, and will, I presume, make every cellphone a mini pc. With the obvious trend in electronics moving away from in-home, in-office, physical gadgetry and storage, it seems to me that the first guy to market a device that runs everything wins.

Who wants a collection of movies taking up space when there’s NetFlix and InDemand? Who wants to buy a whole album when you can cherrypick? Why do I want to buy the brand new Amazon Kindle when I can already read papers and (expensive) books on my iPod, and email, watch TV, movies, listen to music? Why do I want another product that forces me to purchase their exclusive book product?

I don’t.

The first guy to market a device that runs everything wins.

An AP-Ipsos poll in August reported that 25% of Americans read no books in the last year. No books. None. Shocking!

But wait a minute. Take a step back. Last Sunday, I didn’t read a book. Not one. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t read. In fact Sunday is the day for combing the NYT Magazine—online. I also catch up on the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Online. Every day I read the plain old New York Times and the Guardian online. I cancelled my subscription to the local paper over a year ago because the reading-to-waste ratio was too awful. Now, I scan the headlines—online—and my recycling box is a lot lighter.

The point here is that just because a poll says one thing, you can’t presume it says a whole lot of other things. Just because Americans aren’t reading books doesn’t mean that they’re not reading.

So a friend of mine stopped by a few days ago and gazed around the living room at the wall-to-wall books. He’s a musician, and his comment was: I have thousands of CDs, but I don’t want them taking up space in the studio anymore. I don’t need to be able to see them in order to access their information. My collection is digitized and accessible wherever, whenever from my iPod. How would you feel about having your entire collection of books in your pocket?

I admit that my reaction was visceral. It was that pain of loss when your organs shrink away from your skin. My books are so much more than a collection of words. They are more than mere devices that display text. They are—artifacts. Some of them smell like one place, and some like another. The old Jane Eyre that’s been through every major move of the last thirty years is so worn out it’s unreadable. Still, I wouldn’t dream of throwing it away. It’s an old friend. They’re all old friends. I know where I was when I read them first, or last. I know on what side of the spread memorable passages occur.

But wait a minute. Didn’t records used to be like this? I recall staring at Pink Floyd’s The Wall, prominently displayed, while listening to the same. Long before that hazy afternoon, however, 8-tracks were already in our family’s car, and by the time I was in college, cassette tapes had taken over. Good thing, we said, as we took off to Mexico with a stash of music in a shoebox instead of a crate. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve felt any physical connection to my music collection. Unlike with my books, I don’t know who’s sitting next to whom. I don’t care. The ease of accessibility has overwritten the pleasure of spatial conviviality.

Or is it that there’s no sense of loss because the records have been gone for so long?

The definition of artifact is, something created by humans for practical purposes. Records are no longer practical. CDs are no longer practical. Newspapers are no longer practical. And when the right, cross-platform, display device comes along, most books will no longer be practical.

All right, so books may no longer be artifacts, still, not all books are meant to be practical. On another recent Sunday, my youngest son woke up early, and finding himself in a quiet house, browsed the bookshelves nearest the floor. He found a hardcover first edition of Animal Farm—a hand-me-down from a defunct family library—and he sat on the couch under a blanket and read the whole thing before breakfast. I think he’ll remember the experience forever. The book of paper and ink may cease to be a tool, but it will never stop being a gift, a memento, or a treasure.