I admit it. I didn't think the compact disk would catch on. And for those of you scratching your born- after-'85 heads, a compact disk was a medium on which music was stored a time long ago, when reality wasn't on TV and a laptop was roughly the same weight as a Volkswagon bug. It's not that I resist changes in technology (yes, that is a dusty VCR sitting in my cabinet, why do you ask?). After all, 3 weeks ago I walked into my surgeon's office and demanded he make me bionic (I'll let you know how that worked out once the cast comes off). It's just that I'm a huge fan of the "if it ain't broke" school or the "why can we make a mid-size sedan that parallel parks itself, but we can't make a quiet garbage truck?" school.
And then it comes to books. Ebooks. iBooks. The disintegration of libraries. The ban on hardcovers. No one reads real books anymore! Burn them all! They're on the way out! Save the rainforests! Or whatever. People postulate about a post-literary, post-apocalyptic Fahrenheit 451-style world and maybe it's just the copious amounts of Vicodin I'm taking (bionic, remember?), but I'm forced to remember an early childhood jaunt to Epcot Center where they predicted we would eventually colonize the moon. Eventually. Like in 2010. (In 2020, we'll all live under water!)
It's no secret that ereaders are big. They're convenient and allow you to take your entire library wherever you go(!) if you're nomadic or you like that kind of thing. But books, real books, have something compact disks didn't have and ereaders don't: a smell. Varying tactile sensations. A satisfying weight that varies from tome to tome. Pages for flipping, dog-earring, savoring and scribbling on. I love my old-fashioned, low-tech books. I love yellowed pages and a well-read, broken spine. If the future dictates the demise of real books, I'll dig in my heels (or fins, when we're all underwater) and refuse to change. And I don't think I'll be alone. The sound on an MP3 is far better than the sound from a CD, but I just don't think that anything can improve the look, the feel, the smell of words on a page. A real page.
Even Brad Pitt narrating my happily ever after won't change that.
Probably.
Hannah, Wouldn't it be fun to revisit this topic and our LK writing about it 20 years from now (from our underwater havens, of course) to see how it plays out? The fact that I expect massive change in 20 rather than 200 years is all about the speed with which successive technologies overtake and devour earlier ones. Keep reading those lovely, tactile, smelly old things!
Posted by: Susan C Shea | September 29, 2011 at 12:30 PM
Hannah, I'm one of the strange ones who likes the feel of a touch screen! And since I buy cheap paperbacks, not leather bound tomes, there's no smell to miss.
Susan, 2 years ought to do it, and even that is long compared to how long smart phones last.
Posted by: Camille Minichino | September 29, 2011 at 02:03 PM