Happy Leif Ericson Day

[unknownfate]

Every time I fly, I think about the kindle. Normally, I love real, tangible books that smell like the forests they came from, as if stories grew on trees. I'm a book fiend. I love the bookstore smell, the rustle of pages, the different fonts on different pages, all the sensory benefits to a physical book. In a pinch, they can also be used as self-defense against large bugs and small mammals, but it had better be coming at you with poisonous mandibles and quoting the Necronomicon if you use one of my precious tomes. ( Not afraid of bugs. Not enough to risk ichor stains on beloved books anyway.)

My point is that a book is a full sensory experience and my main beef with the kindle is that you lose that. However, traveling by air makes me reconsider, especially in the weenie airplane I traveled in today. It was a a Cessna Propeller plane, and just ittybitty. Lugging a backpack holding my weight in books into a plane the size of a large couch makes me reconsider the benefits of a kindle. Assuming the weird-ass books I like/love/need are available on a kindle, I could frolic in and out of planes with my hands free and standing upright. If there was a way you could draw on one, say a kindle sketchbook, it would be the perfect travel toy for me. Cuz I fly a lot and for a long way.

And I bet I could still stun a Goliath Birdeater with it if he got uppity.

Comments

[siarwenevenstar.livejournal.com]

Is a kindle like an eBook? If so, I am in the REAL book camp!! Convenience be damned!!!! :D

[bane-6.livejournal.com]

It's this (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0015T963C/ref=ms_sbrspot_1?pf_rd_p=494081031&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=507846&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=04FA54RYZ53N43CBQRC9). And I'm not ever going to give up real books, but it sometimes crosses my mind after the first 24 hours in a plane with two trees worth of books in a bag, that maybe technology could lighten my load...

[nitrofieja.livejournal.com]

http://xkcd.com/548/ XD

There's also a method I can recommend as ~practical during long and short journeys - books downloaded from the Net can be printed on recycled paper and discarded page by page as you go.

[bane-6.livejournal.com]

I don't discard well. I usually end up with binders of print outs because I always think of a reason not to throw them away.

[nitrofieja.livejournal.com]

I often have similar difficulties but I'm torn between the desire to keep every scrap for sentimental reasons and the urge to cut the remaining blank spaces and white margins and reuse them... Now I'm having the same problem with a printout of Nabokov's lecture on Kafka's "Metamorphosis". Once read, it could lie in peace on my Nabokoviana shelf where its place is, but I find the idea of any possible scrap sheets remaining uncut unsettling.

[slayersyrena.livejournal.com]

I recall the time I grabbed one of your books... (or was it your sister's? It was red, hardcover, not sure which one...) to kill the 60 wasps in the room I was staying in. I felt guilty about using the book, but it was a dire situation...

I prefer real books over the kindle too. But I see how it could be beneficial in certain situations.

[bane-6.livejournal.com]

Your use of bookly force against our accidently revived cryogenic wasps was approved.