Can You Put A Kindle On A Shelf?

As some of you already know (or could guess), the infringement of the e-book particularly troubles me. When I see Kindles and Nooks being whipped out of bags on the subway or on the sidewalk, the warm, nostalgic core in me trembles with fear. My only comfort is to know that I am not alone; there are others out there who would be willing to fight tooth and nail to keep our dusty, old volumes instead of replacing them with newfangled gadgets. (God…that phrase makes me sound like I don’t even know what the Internet is…)

I have struggled with how to express my discomfort with the flock of Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and other like devices quickly eating up their share of the book market. After all, there’s so much ease associated with these machines: easy annotation (that you can erase, if you choose), a quick and easy download process (so long, library?), and features like text search that make scholarly research, among other things, much easier. It would be unjust if I did not admit to using, even endorsing, that feature, via the text of books that can be accessed via Google Books. Finding a single John Stuart Mill passage from of a 250-page treatise has, frankly, never been easier.

That said, I’m not quite ready to dismiss that hulking political theory textbook that I so lovingly inked up with my Pilot pens, if you know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t. The thing is, I’m not even clear myself why it matters to have this thing physically with me—why should it be any different to have the text on a Kindle where I can neatly whip it up off of a hard drive and still make my own brusque little comments on it and save them/erase them at my leisure?

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A recent article I read on the Guardian website by William Skidelsky investigated the debate regarding the cost of e-books. If there’s no physical book there—if it’s just a text file neatly jostled into, let’s say, a Kindle format—then why the (sometimes) steep prices? The reality, as Skidelsky points out, is that while readers sometimes like to imagine that the price of books ought to be chocked up solely to their physical value (the printing and distribution costs are often as low as $3.50 in the United States), there are still the entire branches of editing and marketing to factor into that final cost.

The debate, which has largely been between Amazon.com and larger publishers, centers on whether or not the relatively high costs of print media should carry over into the digital domain. What's so interesting about this dilemma is that the physicality of the book is really what’s at stake. My final stance in this argument, regardless of how simplistic it sounds, is that I like books as objects, not just as texts. The text, overwhelmingly, is what remains important, but there’s something alluring about actually possessing it.

When compared the music industry, the issue becomes even more revealing. Music, unlike books, is a medium that does not necessarily have a natural physical form; sound must be captured—either to tape, vinyl, or digital file. But now, with the advent of digital music “clouds” and services like Spotify, music seems to also be headed (again) for an “a-physical” presence in most of our lives. We, apparently, no longer want to actually own anything; we want everything embedded into a tiny, easily managed computer file that can be tucked away at a moment’s notice.

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But I don’t want possession in this limited sense. I want books and I want CDs and I want DVDs (if it were at all feasible, I would love a film projector and reels…). Having an iPod to shuffle through different artists at a moment’s notice is pleasant enough, but more pleasant are the mixtapes that I have slaved over for hours (literally).

So there is something, hard though it may be to quantify and acknowledge, to owning a copy of a book, not simply some digital file of it. I like finishing a book and tucking it away neatly into a big set of shelves. There is not, I think, a digital substitute for that.