Hello, my name is Rob and I'm a bookaholic. I first got hooked when I was a kid, locked inside my bedroom with a stack of worn out paperbacks, I would disappear for hours into the pages of "Where the Red Fern Grows" or "James and the Giant Peach." In high school and college, I moved on to the harder stuff. I hitched across the country with Jack Kerouac, ditched the whole scene for Paris with James Baldwin, and found myself at a party in London with Virginia Woolf. I developed all the telltale signs of a book addict -- an inability to walk past the door of a used book store without having a peak inside, and an inability to have a peak inside without rescuing two or three titles from the dusty shelves. On vacations my luggage was loaded down with as many books and magazines as I could cram in between my clothes and other "necessities," and at home, bookcases spilled over and gave way to stacks of read and unread titles proliferating across the floor of my office.
More than just a voracious appetite for reading, my addiction is fueled in part by an unhealthy attachment to books themselves. I love my stacks of books, I love the feel of the pages between my fingers, and the sound of a cover thudding closed after racing through the final pages of a novel. And so, it was with great ambivalence and a healthy measure of skepticism that I entered, about a year ago, into the newly emerged realm of the e-reader. I believe that my wife, who presented me with a shiny new Kindle for my birthday, may have had an ulterior motive relating to the previously mentioned stacks of books, but I too had my reasons to embrace this new technology. The prospect of thousands of books available within seconds, my entire collection in the palm of my hand, accompanying me on the bus, to the gym or the cafe, and even a read aloud feature that would let me keep reading while driving, cooking or at work; all of these were reasons that even a serious book addict such as myself was willing to give the e-reader a try.
But alas, the Kindle never really stood a chance against my beloved collection of books. Being the first of its kind, the Kindle seems fated to take up residence among the 8-tracks and laser discs of history as a transitory technology. With its cramped keyboard, Atari style joystick and readaloud robot voice that sounds like the offspring of Ben Stein and a computer, the Kindle has managed the seemingly impossible feat of appearing both retro and futuristic at the same time. Moreover, the experience of reading on a Kindle fails in comparison with a book in a number of aspects, the most important of which is that a book will never run out of batteries and leave you staring at a blank screen right at a crucial turning point in your novel. I also missed scribbling my little notes in the margins as I read, and being able to pass a great new book along to a friend after finishing it. That being said, the e-reading experience is vastly superior to that of reading on a computer, and the magazine and newspaper features seem to me a sensible alternative to their printed counterparts. I will even admit that, once you find yourself absorbed in the world of a novel, it really doesn't matter in that moment whether the words you are reading are printed on a page or emanating from a screen.
So, although my Kindle leaves much to be desired when compared to my book collection, I am willing to suspend judgement on the e-reading experience as a whole and wait to see where it might take us in the future. And when I step outside of my book-addled haze, even an addict like myself must admit that there are many worthwhile reasons to embrace this new technology. E-books are better for the environment than their printed counterparts in terms of carbon emissions, water consumption and the use of toxic chemicals according to a recent study by the environmental consulting firm Cleantech. E-reading has proven to be a much needed source of revenue for the ailing publishing industry, with Amazon reporting that customers who purchased an e-reader buy 3.3 times as many books as they did before. Services such as Google Books will fundamentally alter the way that we read, placing libraries of searchable works at our fingertips and adding a social and interactive dimension to the act of reading that will foster scholarship and discourse across a variety of disciplines and professions. And devices such as Apple's iPad have already begun to blur the boundaries between the world of books and the internet, signaling a trend that is only certain to continue.
Will books as we know them survive this merging of worlds, and will our withering attention spans even be able to stay focused long enough to finish a novel in our digital future? Only time will tell, but for now, this bookaholic isn't quite ready to kick the habit.