Insomniactive

Given my twin obsessions with reading and the future of media, I should love, Love, LOVE my Kindle. Everyone else seems to (although I sometimes wonder if owning a Kindle is not a little like taking a vacation to a place that seems just slightly outre. Nobody ever comes back and says they absolutely hated Tanzania or Vietnam). I also wonder how the little sucker could be such a phenomenon when I can’t have observed 100 representatives of the species in the wild, and that includes a lot of airports.

Actually, I should love all threeof my Kindles. I bought the 1, 2, and DX. And the Sony Reader before that, and the Rocket E-Book before that. If everybody spent on E-readers like I have, the packaging waste alone would blot out the sun in major metro areas. I sold the 2, and I think I know where the 1 is. I knowI know where the DX is-plugged in and ready to go on my credenza. As I don’t have a son, I don’t know exactly how he would feel if I repeatedly walked into the living room and found him waiting expectantly for me with his baseball glove-but I just poured myself a scotch and walked out wordlessly. I feel that’s how my DX feels. And it doesn’t help that he-I think it’s a he-is at least partially covered by….books.

So when I’m not anthropmorphising my Kindles, I’m ignoring them. And I keep buying books. I can’t really say why; there’s not much logic. The “value prop” of the Kindle is bullet proof in a hundred ways. But Nicholson Baker, in crabby, rambling piece in the New Yorker, comes closer to explaining why than I ever could.