The Pages of a Dilemma

True confession: I'm a big fan of the Libby app. This app searches through all the available books in our metro library system - 168,565 of them at the moment. With a few clicks of the mouse on my laptop, one of those books will magically appear on my Kindle and I am ready to read. There is plenty more reading material available if I include magazines and even more if I am willing to place a hold and wait days, weeks, often months for some popular bestseller. Best of all, I can do all this without leaving the house or the couch. I can, and have, done it at midnight. If I leave home without my Kindle, presto! - said book also appears on my phone, saving me from the boredom of a doctor's waiting room. Because there is so much technology tied up in this reading process, I've wondered what Luddite thinking would be in this instance. I've yet to come up with a clear answer.

As good as I have become about asking all the right Luddite questions before acquiring material items, I've never been able to use the same degree of wisdom and prudence when it comes to reading materials. Maybe it's my addiction to knowing stuff, that little girl in me, reading encyclopedias on the dining room floor still can't get enough book knowledge. For most of my life, when it comes to acquiring books, my frugal and restrained buying nature is nowhere to be found. I lived for my Scholastic books orders as a child. My own children learned early on that the Mom who would say no to a toy or a candy bar would almost always say yes to a book. I remember a day when I went out on a focused mission to find a pair of shoes to wear to a wedding. I came home without the shoes, but somehow had managed to buy a large number of books. When it came to our latest move, the one where we did the retirees' downsize from the large family home to the townhouse, books were the hardest thing to let go of. I was brutal, so I thought, reducing my books by more than half. Nevertheless, our new bedroom still looks like a library. I made the decision not to acquire any more books. I made a decision to read more e-books, and any paper books that entered the house would be from local libraries or those lovely neighborhood boxes that function as book exchanges. There, for every book I'd take, I'd feel obliged to leave one of my own. Or so that was how I hoped it would work. I sometimes still pick up a book at a thrift store, but again, try to pass it on to the neighborhood book exchange when I am finished.

The interesting thing I found about e-books vs. paper books is that I read each differently. The Kindle format makes for quick efficient eye movements and lightning fast page turning and, as a result, I read faster. I can read in the dark without an added light source. Bookmarking allows me to immediately go to the page I left off on, a mixed blessing in that I don't see the book cover, causing me to often ask “Who wrote this again?” or sometimes “What is the title of this book?” I often lose all sense of the length of a book. Not being able to see and feel the physical presence as with a paper book, I'm dependent on the page numbers at the bottom of my Kindle screen. These numbers have their own funny accounting for length of book, and I forget they often include pages and pages of notes and appendices and indexes at the end of the book. I'm sometimes  blindsided by the abrupt end to the body of the book - “That's it? I'm done?”

My brother regularly sends me his fishing magazines when he is done reading them, and occasionally he will send a fishing book along with the magazines. The last batch of magazines contained an old book* he had found in his basement, one that he had had for years but just recently got around to reading. It caused me to revisit the joys of real physical paper books. This hard covered book, published in 1960, had the lovely fabric binding and faded teal color of that era. I enjoyed the content of the book immensely, but it was the format, the font, the slightly yellowed pages and the feel of a real book in my hand that I really savored.

That handed-down book made me realize that though I like to read and I like the instant and wide access that e-books provide, I really do love printed paper books, their look, their feel, the way the page turns and the flipping back and forth to reread or look ahead to find out what is going to happen next and when. I think that is why my go-to Bible is a compact ESV reference Bible with a soft binding, a single satin marker ribbon and a beat up fabric cover. Yes, I use biblegateway.com as my quick-look-something-up concordance, and I do have the YouVersion Bible app on my phone so I look younger than my years when I read along with the sermon scriptures in church on Sunday mornings. And maybe the Luddites, with some time travel, and after applying their questions to the merit of non-paper books - Are we losing something valuable, something of quality by embracing this new technology and does it diminish or enhance our lives? - would surprisingly settle down on the side of the e-book. But as for me, when it comes to settling down in extended time with the Author of the Book, reading psalms, doing some lectio divina, maybe going through a Lenten devotional, I want to be able to feel a real book in my hands. Does that make me a Luddite or not? Hence, the dilemma.

*The book, Trout Madness: Being a Dissertation on the Symptoms and Pathology of This Incurable Disease by One of Its Victims – of course intrigued me. It contained a series of essays on trout fishing in the upper peninsula of Michigan written by a life-long resident who wrote under the name Robert Traver. It also led me on a fun investigative rabbit trail that I'll put in another post soon.