Paper or Plastic?
August 27, 2009

It's like saying goodbye to an illicit lover. You knew going in that it couldn't last forever, knew you'd have exactly so much time together, and no more. You try to draw it out, postpone the inevitable, but sooner or later, you need that climax more than anything. And then it's all over.

Yeah, reading a great book is like that.

Reading a book is a sensual experience for me. When I read, I want the full monty—to touch the paper, smell the ink, see the shape of each word as it enters my brain, hear the rustle of pages, in all ways savor the strangeness and exotica of the world I'm holding in my hands. Is it any wonder I freak out whenever anyone suggests that Kindle and its devil spawn will be the future of reading?

For the blissfully uninitiated, Kindle is a white plastic monitor about the size of a paperback through which it's possible to upload thousands of complete books via Amazon.com. The brainstorm behind this and other hand-held reading devices is apparently that  no one has to bother with possessing actual books any more. Why clutter up your life with shelves, or boxes of dusty old books (much less maintain a library) when you can access anything you want to read at any moment, wherever you happen to be?

Okay, call me a dinosaur, but I'm not looking forward to a future without books. Aside from the aesthetic demerits of reading while hunched over something that looks like a midget Etch-a-Sketch, I tend to read slowly. I wish I could say this was a careful habit acquired during my years as a book critic for the SF Chronicle, but the truth is, I'm just a plodder. And part of the plodding process is going back frequently through stuff I've already read to make sure I've understood something correctly, or to re-read a previous scene in light of new developments in the plot. How can I scroll backwards through pages or chapters of text on a monitor and still keep my place? What if I have to keep referring to a cast of characters at the front of the book, or footnotes, or a glossary at the end? Is having to scroll back and forth through the entire text to do these things really an improvement over the old-fashioned way?

Of course, Kindle is just the latest salvo in the campaign to eradicate paper from our lives. It began with the option of plastic instead of paper at the grocery store. Now cash is going the way of the Dodo, with bank card-swiping machines at every checkout counter. Email is faster and more efficient than letters, newspapers are shrinking to Hobbit size while news services build up their web presence, and consumers are encouraged to do their shopping, banking, and bill-paying online. (And be prepared for slack-jawed dismay if you try to explain that you'd rather come in and chat with an actual person.) In future, I suppose, all stimuli—books, music, movies, sports—will be piped directly into the brain, via a phone headset-like device, or maybe a chip; oh, wait, we're halfway there now, with everyone plugged into an iPhone or iPod.

I get it that the paper-free society of the future will be ecologically correct, a boon for the planet, the trees, and the rain forests. I'm even willing to entertain the argument that any technological gadget that gets written matter into the hands of at-risk (of not reading) youth is probably a good thing, although I can't understand why a plastic hand-held device is superior in that respect; a book already is a hand-held device. As a writer, of course, if anyone wants to read my book via Kindle, braille, Morse-code, or an old View-Master, I couldn't be more thrilled. But as a reader, all I ask is the right to one simple, tactile pleasure that doesn't have to be recharged, connected, or booted up for me to enjoy.

Sure, they probably used to say the same sort of thing about Guttenberg and the printing press, back in the day: how can you claim to have savored the total reading experience in all its privilege and majesty if some monk didn't go blind transcribing every precious one-of-a-kind page for your pleasure? And I know the technoids charge that we old-school bookists are making a fetish out of an inanimate object with no intrinsic value of its own beyond the story it conveys. But it's not that I idolize the sacred idea of the book; it's the thing itself I treasure, a comforting presence, like an old friend.

Paper breathes, ink bleeds, a book bends and folds and whispers to the hand in a way a piece of plastic never can. I just finished reading a wonderful book, whose cover I still occasionally touch with fondness, through whose pages I still occasionally rifle, while preparing to track down the sequel. It's over between us, yet it's a great comfort to me to keep this tangible relic of all we shared so close at hand. Parting could never be such sweet sorrow from a hunk of cold plastic.

(Discuss your favorite fetish object with lisajensen@sbcglobal.net, or visit Lisa's random blog at http://www.redroom.com/author/lisa-jensen)