A Kindle Brief

            Every once in a while I stumble upon an article, essay, blog, column or commentary about the inevitable demise of printed books and how sad it makes the journalist, essayist, blogger, columnist or commentator. The most recent one was two weekends ago in the New York Times Magazine, in a piece entitled “Thy Neighbor’s Floor-to-Ceiling Bookshelves,” by Mireille Silcoff. I’m not familiar with Ms. Silcoff’s work, and I had a hard time locating any bio information within the two-page spread. Then again, I've misplaced my reading glasses.  
            The reasons given in these various articles about tears being shed are almost always the same: people just like the way paper feels and sounds when you touch and turn it; books lend aesthetic appeal to living rooms and home offices in ways electronic devices cannot; books far more easily provide an air of history, knowledge and substance than do their e-counterparts. You get the picture.
            But what I can’t really understand is why hardly anyone discusses the real reasons behind our end-of-books angst.
            For example...
            If you drop a Kindle in the sand at Jones Beach, you’ll worry for days as you keep checking its functionality, hoping you won’t get electrocuted in the process. But if you drop a book in the sand at Jones Beach, you’ll shake it off and continue reading. Electrocution isn’t even a remote possibility.
            If you inadvertently stick a Kindle in your back pocket and then sit down on a park bench, you could very well hear the crunch from hell, followed by a four-letter expletive of your own making. But if you stick a book in our back pocket, all you’ll say is oops, which is a decidedly less egregious four-letter word.
            If you’re even the least bit technologically savvy you can find a way to hide digital information in a Kindle that might come in handy in the future. But only in a real book can you find things that bring back the past. Like parking tickets you forgot to pay. Or old Father’s Day cards from your kids when they were young, which of course will make you cry—although it's okay since a book, unlike a Kindle, won’t short out on your tears. Or old love letters that I really don’t want to talk about right now on the chance that my wife might decide to finally read my blog, beginning with "A Kindle Brief.," and then ask me questions. If she does, I will do all I can to make it brief conversation.
            Finally, if you’ve written and published anything that’s available exclusively on Kindle, anybody can go to Amazon and see how well it’s selling by looking at its listed sales rank. But with a print book, if anyone asks you how it’s doing you can always say, “Not bad,” which can mean almost anything.
            For those of you who know the book to which I’m referring with the play-on-words title of this essay (leave a comment if you do—I’m just curious), I just picked it up at the library from the cart they use for books they wish to discard. I thought it might come in handy one day, especially for some of my Jewish-oriented writing. And it will look good on my bookshelf. And I can bring it to the beach, and put it in my back pocket. I’m actually going to go look for it now. After all, I think I left my reading glasses inside as a bookmark.