Blog

Blog 7,April

HELLO, READERS! WELCOME TO APRIL.

Recently I got one of those reading gizmos. You know, the new thingamabob that lets you read off a screen no bigger than a paperback book. And it will hold newspapers, magazines, and up to 200 books in its little electronic brain. As an author myself I thought I ought to weigh in on this. For, I’m wondering: will it put me out of business? Or, will it juice up the opportunity for my written words to pay off?

The first day I got it, I plugged it in to charge it up. And I was thinking, I’m really going to hate this—I’m not going to have the feel of a solid book in my hands. I’m going to be robbed of the whispery crackle and pop of a new book opening. I’m not going to get that spicy marigold smell of book-binding glue, nor the finger-tickling thrill of thumbing pages.

But as I turned on the gizmo and its Home Page lit up, I was as delighted as a kid at my own birthday party. Yep, this reading gizmo is likely to recharge reading. It could become to books what the I-pod is to music. And no doubt for kids born these days practically texting in the womb, it’s going to be as much a part of their lives as cell phones and cheeseburgers.

Of course I had to call the 1-800 number to really get the gizmo working. For, even after reading the instruction booklet, I couldn’t get the darn thing to turn pages. When I admitted my stupidity to the tech specialist, she decided to use me as a test case for rewriting the instruction manual. And I sure made it clear that no real writer had written their how-to-book. They hadn’t used any of the laws Hemingway taught us. Yeah, sure, the sentences were short; but the words were fuzzy. I suggested a little Faulkner should be written into the manual. At least then if you couldn’t understand the words, you could at least “feel” the meaning of the sentences. And you’d come away with a sense that you’d done just what Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech when he reminded writers they should always write about the heart being in conflict with itself.

Now, what about these awful statistics coming out-- that about 1 in 4 Americans read a book a year? I’m betting this new gizmo might make a difference. There’s just something magical in ordering a book and seeing it appear on your screen in about the same time it takes to sing “Yankee Doodle.”

Well, it’s been a few weeks now. I’ve read my first whole book on my new gizmo. Frankly, there’s no substitute for the intimacy of having a real book in your hands. But I HAVE had fun clicking and clacking through the pages. So here’s the low down and my final my opinion—This electronic reading will relate to books as the coming of the camera once related to painting. Yes, we will choose lots of books to read on a screen; but the ones in our homes will be the ones we buy as art.