I recently started using my Nook. It is an amazing piece of technology. But it invites a question. It is really a sufficient substitute? Aesthetically, almost nothing beats a room with a bookcase, with rows and rows of beautiful spines shining out. Even if left unread, they're great looking furniture. But lets consider them as read. If you read a book, you have to have the right lighting, you have to be lucky enough to be aquainted with the right font, and the size of the font has to be just right to meet your eye's expectations. You also have to be armed with a bookmark because the last thing you want to do is dog-ear a page, unless it's a book you don't really care about. And even if you leave the book for a matter of minutes, there's always the slightly annoying interval where you're trying to find out exactly where you left off, and if you were off by just a little, you're stuck wading through a part you don't really pay attention to because you've already read it; you're just waiting to bump into the unfamiliar so that the pleasure of your reading can continue on unabated.
I find that the Nook takes care of all these inconveniences. I just remembered. A huge inconvenience with owning a mound of books is that if you move, they have to go with you, which means you have to start collecting boxes or buying plastic containers to store them in, and then you have all the labor that goes into loading them and unloading them, and then unloading the books themselves and reshelving them into some kind of order. Up to 2,500 volumes can be stored on a Nook, and it comes equipped with bookmarks. It is easy to navigate and you have access to and are able to buy newpapers and magazines too! But what is it about a book that makes it irreplacable? I have the convenience of having quick access to 'what is read'. But what is it that I miss about the real book? Do I miss the smell? Do I miss the feel of the pages in my fingers? Do I miss the fact that I love the little work it takes to make it through a book? Do I miss the fact that the book itself becomes a sort of friend, that you can personalize it, mark it, underline, make notes? But you can do this with a Nook.
Is it the digital medium that makes it less personal? But what's personal about physical pages compared to digital prose? I'm enjoying my Nook, but I feel like I'm missing something.
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I feel like I could never get on board with the "nook", like you stated it would just be missing something. I love owning books, I love having them in stacks on the floor or on shelves beside the bed (mewithoutYou anyone?) and I'll admit I haven't read a lot of the books I own, I'd like to think I'll get around to them sooner or later but thats beside the point. I like to have the actual copy, I like to hold it in my hands, inspect it, examine the cover art, and whatever else. I'm the same way with music, I don't even own an ipod anymore. I'd much rather have a solid copy of the music, whether it be on vinyl (preferably on vinyl), cd or even cassette I wanna own it and hold it and look at it whenever I want.
ReplyDeleteI will give you that books, and any other collections, are a huge pain to load up and move around when you're going to live in a new place. But in my opinion it's a small price to pay to have a badass book collection on display and at your finger tips when ever you want to thumb through one again or just whenever you have ladies come over and they can see how awesome and intelligent you are by the amount of books you have displayed on your walls.
Ron Burgundy: Um, I'm very important. I have many leather-bound books, and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.
ReplyDeleteSays it all. It just doesn't do it to show your girl a collection of downloaded books on a Nook. Great point on comparing the Nook to the iPod. The Nook does to books what the iPod does to music. Something is aesthetically lost when a record or a book is replaced with a bite. At least in my experience, the iPod has hindered me from listening to a whole band. My wish to have that one song of that entire album, that I don't have to buy the whole album to listen to one song, has been fulfilled, but there's a price to pay: it may be that I never listen to any other song put out by that artist, since I'm fully contented with the one song I wanted.