book vs. kindle

My issue with the kindle is not related to the device at all. The light design, the travel friendly size and practicality, instant access to books, and the built in dictionary are all features that after a few uses I find it hard to live without.

My issue with the kindle is kinesthetic. And also the fact that I can’t read maps in the beginning of the book due to small print which as an avid fantasy reader – is a very huge problem. I do love the library itself. In the town I grew up in it was a beautiful building that I still have memorized in my mind. The children’s section was through the back door and down the stairs, the Nancy Drew series was on the second shelf from the bottom in the 4th row (I not only read them all, I was a bit o/c about reading them in order. If the next book was out, I waited til it was back) and the choose your own adventure series books were in turnstyle bookcases. The Adult section (which sounds inappropriate now, I wonder if they renamed?) required a 2 flight walk upstairs. In those days there were “due date” cards pasted into the front of books. You could tell how popular the book was by the amount of stamps it had. In some cases the book required a second stamp slip which covered the original. I’d look at those stamps with the dates and start to think of the time out of the library the book had spent, imagine the book and where it was a few months ago and who had been reading it, or it sitting all by itself on the shelf for 2 years with no one picking it up.

I do this imagination process with coins too, as I wrap them. I love to wrap coins and I think of silly things while I do it – the fact that I might be splitting up two pennies that had travelled all the way from texas together (b/c you always seem to get at least 2 pennies back), if the coin from 1969 had one owner or 10,000. If the dirty coin I was adding to the roll would get washed or trashed, melted down, and remade into a new coin.

Ok, I’ve shown enough crazy for today. I miss you pages, but I love you my lovely white e-reader. You give me no cramps in my wrists and when I slide you off my lap accidently you still hold my page. And even though every book costs me money (except the books no one wants to read, those are free) at least I have instantaneous access to the book (in the USA). And I guess the point is that I know exactly where my e-reader has been. Library books…not so much.  OMG is that what they meant by "Adult Section?"