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A bit of technology I absolutely HATE...
Cell phones, GPS, etc etc etc, I can live with...but electronic books? No freakin way...
When I was a kid one gift my Mom gave me was a love of books...Want to find out about me? Go look a my library...my books (just the titles) will tell you everything you want to know...
A book has weight, substance...you can get lost in a book...those things you can't do with a Kindle...there is enough information in my books to see you through the end of the world as we know it...try that with your electronic book...
I look at my book shelves and see knowledge, treasure and for those times I need it...pure escape...
I look at the Kindle and I see.....plastic.....and a battery...
My wife wants a Kindle and I am totally rebelling at the thought of having one in the house...
Rant Off...
When I was a kid one gift my Mom gave me was a love of books...Want to find out about me? Go look a my library...my books (just the titles) will tell you everything you want to know...
A book has weight, substance...you can get lost in a book...those things you can't do with a Kindle...there is enough information in my books to see you through the end of the world as we know it...try that with your electronic book...
I look at my book shelves and see knowledge, treasure and for those times I need it...pure escape...
I look at the Kindle and I see.....plastic.....and a battery...
My wife wants a Kindle and I am totally rebelling at the thought of having one in the house...
Rant Off...
Sharps Model 1874 - "The rifle that made the west safe for Winchester"
Replies
However, then I thought of people on the road all the time who have to travel light: Traveling businessmen, college students who move every year, troops going overseas where space is limited, etc... Then I made peace with the idea.
However, I still won't own one until such a time that I feel the extra cost is justified by the space saved. I predict nothing less than a deployment will push me over the edge.
"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, and speed is the economy of motion" - Scott Jedlinski
Ahmen!
A librarian friend tells me that 'Big Brother' is threatening, coercing, or whatever methods they use, to try for force all libraries to remove books printed before a certain date (can't remember the year) due to lead in the ink. Surely the govt. has better things to do????
In the '50s and 60s, I worked at the local newspaper/print shop daily after school, and Saturday. Hand setting lead type, casting lead for pictures, and always had black hands from ink. I may well be a little nuts, but my blood levels for lead have never been even remotely high.
I congratulate you on your library, and agree 100%
i just love my books. i spend about 2 or 3 times a week at our local used book seller. i just hope that those E books dont take too much of a bite out of their books.
- Don Burt
Like you jayhawker, I find the feel and look of books comforting. Heft, smell, the feel of the paper, it all seems like home.
On the other hand, I would have killed in order to replace 30 pounds of textbooks and several square feet of locker and backpack space for a Kindle like device. Carrying all that during junior and senior high sucked.
Winston Churchill
You give some, you get some...
I dread to see the day if I live long enough that Kids graduating High school, will not know how to use a table of contents,in a book or an appendix section for reference, or find a book in the librarary, Not that most of them can do that now, but it will get worse as technology advances. I would hate to be on a flight in a commerical airline and some emergency pops up, and the pilots "Kindle" quit or the batteries went dead, and that pilot didn't know how to use a published flight manual and look up the emergency procedures... Wouldn't you? It this so called Kindle also reads the book for you do to our technology, then thats not reading, thats just listening to an electronic sythesized voice telling you a story,, Kind of like your mother reading to you.....
Sent from my Motorola Atrix 4G via Tapatalk
It REALLY was nice on the plane and hotel. 3 novels would have taken a whole nother carryon bag. I am a very fast reader, and cannot sleep on a plane. I polished off the first novel and half of the second before I got to JFK. Finished the 3rd book somewhere over Arkansas on the way back home.
While I prefer real paper, the Kindle rocks for travel.
-Mikhail Kalashnikov
Side note on the cost of the Kindle (and other readers) - my wife, who is also attending college to complete her degree in social work, pointed out that TEXTBOOKS on the readers make a whole lot of sense!
You can carry a lot more with you from class to class, the cost of a college textbook can be outrageous - over $300 per sememster in some programs, more for certain specialties (which is impossible to recover completely, especially for books you MIGHT never need again!) RENTING textbooks by the month is an option (ten or twenty bucks!!) and could pay for the $140 initial investment before you even attended your first class. If you're taking something like a humanities or math class only to complete the requirements for graduation, and the class has little to do with your actual degree, this is a huge savings! I had some of my college texts (mostly that the school wouldn't buy back, as the class moved on to newer editions) that I finally got rid of ten years later after never opening them ONCE after graduation.
Further note - for those with eyesight challenges, most readers give you an option to adjust font size. You aren't limited to large-print editions to be able to read what you want or need. This is a factor for both my wife and me as the years and health issues affect the eyes.
I don't agree, but I can appreciate where you're coming from.
I was a voracious reader, for about 20 years, and I wouldn't throw anything away, because I could just glance at the titles and bring back to mind all the good parts of those books. I read everything from the classics to spy/thrillers and westerns. Heck, I read "Moby Dick,' and 'Crime and Punishment'....voluntarily! I even read 600-700 pages of 'From Here to Eternity,' before trashing it...because James Jones decided to kill off Pruitt, with 150 pages left in the book. I even tried a few on philosophy, thinking it would improve my education, but quickly gave that up, because they made my head hurt.
But, I'm much better, now. After about 5 years of not reading a single book, when I was learning to make a living on a computer, I came to look upon all those sagging, dusty shelves, loaded down with thick books, as trophies that I no longer needed. (I quit hanging dead animals on the wall at about the same time.) I realized that I did not care in the least about trying to prove anything to anybody else, and that I didn't need to keep them around to remind myself of who I was. Also, I realized that all of those books had become a part of who I was and how I thought, even if I couldn't consciously recall what I had extracted from each one.
So, I picked out about a hundred to keep, and loaded the rest in the back of my pickup and hauled them to the second hand book store. They typically bought the books they wanted, for 1/4 of their retail price, and re-sold them for 1/2 price. But, there were so many that they didn't want to go through them all, so the guy finally just offered me (very reluctantly) $50 for the pickup load and I took it. I'm over the trauma of it, now, and it hasn't affected me in any adverse way.
So, now, I'm thinking about a Kindle, just to see if it will encourage me to start reading again. I haven't been able to stay awake through the first three chapters of anything, for years, and want to get back to it, for those days when I don't want to be outside. It would solve the problem of switching glasses around and getting the light just right, and might be just the boost I need to get me started.
No, it's not the same as a hardbound book. I still love those and have STACKS of them I still need to read, but an e-reader has its place.
It happens when people are sharing a meal, any face to face time, add getting to the front of any line and making everyone behind wait and driving a vehicle and thus "owning then the road" to that list! Same goes for electronic games, laptops, music players and so on, one thing one should had invested heavily on 20 years ago was headphone manufacturing.
Some say that man's greatest invention is not the wheel but the printing press, books transport ideas, thoughts and knowledge instead of material things. A book, a printed book is a simple thing that can be read by many for hundreds of years, it can be read and handed from one person to another, over and over a long as you have enough light to do so it works even if you are stranded in an island.
Now you have to buy some electronic gitzmo, make sure the batteries have juice regardless of being outdoors at daylight, be careful not to break the thing or having it stolen and buy your own private copy of the "book" as I suppose that the point of selling books in this format is that they are no longer passed on but that everyone pays to read "their own private copy", 10 years from now they will change the format so all those electronic books you purchased will become trash!
Ah, yes. But, does your book play Angry Birds?
I can see those who travel a lot, commute by train, etc loving the heck out of em. I haven't yet taken the plunge, but may, especially since my vision isn't getting better, invest in one that can read TO ME as well as zoom, etc. The droid is a little small for such use, but 1 1/2 hours waiting in the doc's office I coulda used a book yesterday.
Source of toilet paper when reading in the little room if you run out of the real stuff....
When you need to prop something up, there is always a book exactly the right thickness....
You can throw them at people when they interupt you while you read the good bits.....
There is no record of you buying them if you pay cash......therefore your 'tastes' cant be monitored electronically....
You can leave them lying around and if someone steals or borrows it, its no great loss....
A book helps the economy by providing work for farmers, forestry workers etc right through to sales people......
You can write things in them like ' To my dear friend Scott, Happy Birthday'.....
When you drop a book on the floor it doesnt break......
Its batteries never go flat.....
Books help students solve logistic problems like how to carry them to school and at the same time build muscles etc....
Books provide paper for checking if you have freefloated the barrel on your rifle properly....
You can loan them to people when you are not reading them.....
You can yell at people when they dont return them, thus teaching you how to interact with others....
You can rip out the last few pages of mystery murder novels before loaning them to people you dont like.....
There are more, but I dont like computers
Advantages of having a Kindle:
None of the above.....
Alec.
― Douglas Adams
Yeah, and we all wait with baited breath for the "GA NEWSLETTER/chain mail" every MONTH. :roll:
Much as I can wax poetic about fetching the new "Boys Life" out of the mail box and reading every word, or safguarding a borrowed Asimov tome from the public library (or the one I had to replace when it was lost, mowing lawns to make the money) I like the e-book idea. haven't gone there yet, but yeah, it's easy, and back-up saavy folks will never lose em. I found a thumb drive with 12 GB of files, including a book on it. Snooping the files, I found a saved email and was able to contact the guy who lost it. He replied with his addy, and I popped it in the mail, Cost me 88 cents to get it back to him.
http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/21/7879573-you-can-now-check-out-kindle-books-from-11000-libraries
I checked, and the local library that we're a member of is one of those 11,000.
DPRMD
Also I have worn out, out of print books that I have looked at replacing as I love re-reading them so much and the cheapest I could find them were between $100 and $200 each. $1.99 on Kindle. A lot of books are a LOT cheaper in digital format and they take up no space on my shelf. plus there is no waiting for a new book, I buy it on Amazon and seconds later it is on my Kindle, saves on gas driving to the book store, saves on shipping over traditional books and saves on wait time as the digital copy is never out of stock.
All fine and dandy until the power goes out for a couple of weeks and your battery dies...
You are also ignoring the fact that when the next ice age hits, you can always use your old books(The tax code comes to mind) for fuel...try that with your E-Book...
True, but the battery in a Kindle lasts about a month, I have multiple ways of charging it off portable battery backup systems alone that use the same micro USB connections, if I need to read that bad it will charge from the generator or the cig light adapter in the car and I still have a TON of books to use for fuel during the iceage while still saving my favorites electronically so these great works will never be lost. :tooth:
I haven't broken out the tin foil hat just yet, but I do get the feeling that our society's dependence on these electronic devices will come back to bite us one day. I don't care if you do have 3000 books loaded on your Kindle/i phone, with one push of a button you may have nothing but a piece of plastic to look at.