Friday, December 31, 2010

Reading Devices

I’m not crazy about the big office supply chain stores, but as they have pretty much put the little stores out of business, what can you do? I have one nice thing to say about Staples, anyway. They have this program where you can take in used printer cartridges for recycling and get store credit (you can return a maximum of 10 cartridges a month for $20 credit—and while most people won’t use that many at home, at the office where I work, we go through enough that my coworker and I can each return 10 a month). So yesterday I was able to take this credit letter they sent me in the mail and get my office supply needs for free. I bought a box of envelopes to mail more of my calendars, and a new notebook, for 2011 (always an exciting thing to find).

When I was about to leave the checkout line, a guy asked a clerk if they had any Kindles left, and the clerk said they were all sold out. That struck me as kind of odd. Can you imagine having to turn down a sale of that size, just because you are out of stock? And why was this guy so keen on getting a Kindle at that moment—presumably too late to be a Christmas gift—was he suddenly keen on reading something that his Kindle would provide him? Does the popularity of the Kindle mean popularity in reading? How much do people read, anyway, and what do they read? Is this an area where statistics are any good at all?


I really don’t know how I feel about these reading devices, or whether I think it reflects on how much people read or what they read. I know that whenever I see someone reading a BOOK it kind of makes me happy, even though it’s usually a Harry Potter book or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I read quite a bit of text on my computer, after all. I guess what it comes down to is when I think about the last book I read, or the last several, or the many books I’ve read over the years, if I imagine reading them on a reading device, a Kindle, or a computer, or a phone, the idea horrifies me. Maybe it isn’t so much what I think the problems with new ways to read are as it why does the book as an object hold so much fascination for me? Is it—again, like so many things—just nostalgia?

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