My son doesn’t like my Kindle. It was his suggestion that the family give it to me for my birthday, but he doesn’t like it. “It’s not the same he says, the bits and bytes are not substantial. I like the smell of the book, and how it feels in my hand,” he said. “You’ll be the ruin of the book as we know it,” he added.
I made my arguments about that bastard Gutenberg who put the monks out of business with his cold lifeless print, but my son was not persuaded. I even argued that his computer games have put board games out of business.
WoW, he said.
And this morning my wife is copying down phone numbers and addresses in an address book. “Computers fail,” she says, “the power might go out and then where would you be.”
“I’ll bet you use a ballpoint pen,” I said.
“I have no idea what that means,” she said. “Not everyone has read everything you’ve read you’ll have to explain the context if you expect me to understand.”
“It’s not something I read,” I said. “It’s something I watched, Meryl Streep, in “Doubt,” the movie we saw night before last.
She laughed.
Meryl Streep plays a nun who is like my son and wife is a fan of yesterday’s technology. A nun who is dismayed by the use of that modern contrivance, the ball point pen.
And now back to subject of my Kindle though I don’t think it’s a Kindle at all if this description from the guide is correct:
He also had a device that looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million “pages” could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.*
It’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
*Adams,D. (1979) The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (pp.26-27) New York: Harmony Books
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