By: Lindsey Hutchins
Posted In: Opinion
Photo credit: MCT Campus
The Kindle offers a new experience in reading
The kindle is a relatively new creation. At only 8.7 ounces, this piece of technology can hold up to 3,500 books. The kindle boasts the ability to reduce the glare issue of “ordinary paper”, and provides the user with the ability to select from eight font sizes that can be changed at any time. I am sure this invention is enjoyed by many and is excellent for travelers, or those who flit from reading various materials at one time. Yet, for reasons initially unbeknown to me, this small foreign box broke my heart.
Due to the rapid technological boom, the Kindle was a relatively unsurprising invention, especially in entertainment. Apple has taken the media by firestorm, revolutionizing the market with new technologies in music and computers, each slightly more evolved than the last. One of the most recent Apple inventions to hit the market is the Ipad, a tablet computer with the ability to display books, movies, web content, periodicals and resources in a sleek light package. Within 80 days of release, Apple sold three million. The Kindle was no shock in this age of constant creation; however I personally am so confused by it. There has perhaps never been a time in history, where technology was as progressive as today, yet I wonder when it has gone too far. Technology has already been seen to erase human contacts, and jobs, as seen by bank branches closing, with ATM’s taking the reins. The Kindle erases something so tangible about the experience of reading. I wonder if everyone had a kindle, as is becoming the case with laptops, will libraries still exist? I for one, have spent many hours in my hometown library, exploring sections like poetry, where I discovered inky old books, with thick reliable spines, written by Anne Sexton, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and my favorite, Henry David Thoreau. The women who worked the desk at my hometown library were often the only sounds; the soft feminine humming of their delicate chatter. The topics always seemed to be their families, soccer games, anticipations for homecoming, what they would do for dinner that evening, “Chicken cordon bleu, hamburger helper? No I already made that Tuesday.” The repetition of these women, who seemed to know every book, and every author, painted this building a calm, safe place, and I retreated to it often. My family owns an antique store in Ogunquit, Maine, which allotted many interesting class presentations in Elementary school, not to mention Halloween costumes. As I grew older, it revealed literature from the past. The books written many years ago seem to be more ornate than those sold today; thick hard-cover books, surely bound by careful steady hands, labeled neatly often with scripture fonts. To open one of those books, a reader may be greeted with the scent of antiquity that can only be described as musk. I once discovered a copy of “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau, with a beautiful forest green cover, a gilded label, complete with swirls of green, as though vines of gold were extending. The inside cover, revealed a neatly placed, personal seal that read, “E.R. Richards”, and later I even found a newspaper clipping about Thoreau in the book from the early 1900’s. I think E.R. was perhaps as big of a fan of Thoreau as I am. Novels contain stories- stories of people, places, lives, and times that unite all of us in an understanding of worlds previously impossible to imagine. To delve into these lives, I need “ordinary paper”, the glare of light, the scents, the tangible aspect. To change and develop at such a steady pace is only human, yet in the process a lot of what was once good is left behind. I believe that when you find an experience real and beautiful, that if only for a moment it wakes you from the fog of daily life, it is crucial to grasp it, for everything that it is. Perhaps I am old fashioned, but if given the opportunity to own one of these tools, I would pass. I would rather stay behind reveling in all that was once good, and still is: history, imperfection, reality.