St8ED.

If you know me, then you know that I am technology forward; I have an iPhone, my field is Instructional Technology, and if you even think about touching my Mac, it will be the last thing you ever do. But I hesitated to adopt e-reader technology.

I suppose, initially, my hesitation was based on some nostalgic idea that it was the touching the books and listening to the soft swish of the page as I devoured the words that were the foundation of my enjoyment. I allowed myself to espouse the notion that without those peripheral traits of paper books, I could not fully immerse in the reading experience.

Boy, was I wrong.

Last week, I downloaded the Kindle for iPhone app and purchased my first book, Outliers by Malcom Gladwell. Since I don’t own a Kindle (yet), I began reading the book on my iPhone. Granted, after thirty minutes or so of reading, I started having eye-strain issues, but the iPhone was never meant to be the primary reading medium anyways. The wonderful part is that anytime I had a few minutes to spare, I could pull out my phone, press a button, and pick up where I left off. And in most of these situations, I would have never had the hardcopy book with me (sitting in the car circle waiting to pick up my kids, waiting in the doctor’s office, etc.). The whole experience has been wonderful, and I haven’t once wished I had a paper-based book instead.

So, to critics of Kindle, like Sven Birkerts, who recently wrote an anti-kindle essay in The Atlantic, I say the benefits of the Kindle and other e-readers far outweigh whatever drawbacks could be conceived. Paper bound books were the only way to transmit written works to the masses (or elite, depending on the era), and publishers had full control over who got published and how it was distributed. To attach some kind of cultural implication to the medium society was limited to in the past is a mistake; we should embrace and explore the medias available to contemporary society.

Imagine the world where knowledge was passed orally, where handwritten documents were few and time-consuming to reproduce. I imagine the orators and document copiers were skeptical of the printing press; having full control over how and to whom knowledge was dispersed and being faced with losing that control probably freaked them out. They probably feared the consequences of a society with access to their protected knowledge. Whatever would come from such a society?



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