(This is an excerpt from my post here: stantlitore/2014/01/26/printebook-rivalry-its-a-bit-silly/) Okay, I just have to respond to this. 1. Who cares about impressive? This might be difficult to grasp, but I actually read books for reasons other than being impressive. 2. If we *are* going to talk about impressive, my kindle holds over 10 times the number of books shown in that photograph. You know whats impressive? Carrying an entire library in the palm of my hand is impressive. In the Middle Ages, I could have bought most of Europe with that quantity of books. 3. Also, why the rivalry? In all seriousness, most kindle owners I know also own printed books, albeit in varying quantities. I tend to read the Bible, books with a heavily visual component, a J.R.R. Tolkien novel, and any reference book in paper; I tend to read most everything else on my kindle, yet I do own many, many printed books. Why must we act as though it MUST be one or the other? When the printed book was first invented, there was a period of about 150 years in which the literate of the age owned both manuscripts and the newfangled printed books. Frankly, it is also more impressive to own a wall in Babylon with the original Gilgamesh chiseled into hard stone than it is to own either of the two libraries shown here. It would also be more impressive to own two stone tablets that you could carry around in an elaborate ark of wood and gold. It would even be more impressive to own a room with thousands of scrolls cubbied into the walls; opening a mass market paperback just cant compare with the experience of hearing the crackle of papyrus as you unroll a scroll, or seeing the inked-in Greek lettering of some scribe who devoted months to the effort of recording that book by hand, or taking the time to prepare a special place for reading that is secure from any moisture that could damage your scroll, or the intellectual sweat and sense of almost physical achievement that goes into picking out words from an endless stream of letters without punctuation or spacing. What is the experiencing of opening a paperback, compared with the sublime activity of reading a scroll? But you dont see me making memes about that.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 21:53:54 +0000
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