No, no, no! That was me as I read an article from the latest issue of Newsweek entitled ""Books Aren't Dead (They're Just Going Digital)."" In this horrifying article, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos promotes his new electronic doo-hickey, the ""Kindle,"" as the savior of reading. Apparently, the Kindle is a gadget that holds over 200 books and displays the pages on a screen. Now, one might suppose that, being the literature lover I am, I would support any new device that promotes and spreads reading. After all, Bezos says the underlying idea of the Kindle ""is that you should be able to get any book - not just any book in print, but any book that's ever been in print - on the Kindle, in less than a minute.""
Despite all its advantages and possible benefits, I do not support the Kindle. In fact, it makes me want to vomit. I love books, and by that I don't just mean words strung together to form ideas, convey emotions and create stories. I'm also talking about the physical book itself, feeling the soft pages of a book beneath my fingertips, dog-earing the pages and bending the binding. For me and many other readers, reading is not only a mental and emotional experience, it's physical, sensual one as well. If books become mainly electronic, an essential part of the reading experience will be lost.
For instance, one of the best parts of reading is the smell of the book. Personally, I consider myself a connoisseur of book smells and my sense of smell is so refined that I can detect differences, no matter how small, between every book I've ever read. Even more than that, these scents are tied to my memory. All I have to do is flip through the pages of a novel, breathe in the scent and I am instantly taken back to when I first read it. Imagine me and other book-scent experts pressing our noses against a Kindle! All that would accomplish is smudging the screen.
Furthermore, if Kindle creates the revolution in reading that Bezos predicts, we will lose the human mark and history that physical books record and that readers love. Why else would so many people collect used and first editions? I have many books my grandparents once owned - yellowed with age, margins scribbled with notes. Sometimes I even find old newspaper clippings tucked between the pages. I just don't think a future kid will appreciate it the same if his grandfather passes a Kindle along to him (Grandpa, this is just a regular Kindle. I already have the Kindle 2.0!).
The idea of a world where people sit curled by the fire or at their child's bedside reading from an electronic screen sends a chill down my spine, as it should for any true book lover. So, here's my plea to all readers out there: Don't buy the Kindle! Never ever! Instead, I suggest we all celebrate the launch of this little gadget by going to a local bookstore, buying a real book or two, flipping them open and deeply inhaling the pages.
Interested in starting up a used-book perfumery business? Email Anna at akwilliams1@wisc.edu.
