When the Kindle was initially unleashed in 2007, it sold out in about five and one-half hours. Murmurs of printed books becoming obsolete quickly filled the air, while panic filled many a room. Fast forward 10 years later, and printed books are still steady and going strong. That’s because the Kindle screen can never truly replace the printed page. Here’s why.
It’s tough to read a Kindle at the beach.
And not just because of the sun glare. If your book gets covered with splashes or sand, you just wipe it off and move on. If your Kindle gets covered with splashes or sand, you’re pretty much screwed.
Whatever would we do with our bookshelves?
True, we could stock our shelves full of knickknacks and photo frames. But books are so much easier to dust.
No more new book smell.
The aroma of a new Kindle simply can’t compete with the new book smell. The latter smells of promise, adventure, daring and escape – and a strange chemical combination that kind of gives us a head rush. A new Kindle doesn’t really smell like anything.
No more note-taking fun.
We’d miss out on all the fun of highlighting text, scribbling notes in the margins, and sticking Post-its to pages we want to visit often.
No more personalized dedications.
How is an author supposed to scrawl a heartfelt note and oversized signature with a Sharpie marker on the front page of your Kindle?
Kindles make crappy hiding places.
Ever glue all the pages of a large, hardcover book together and then cut out a rectangular area in the middle to make a secret hiding place? Me, too! Try cutting out the middle of a Kindle and you won’t get an awesome hiding place. You’ll just get a costly mistake.
Less impressive to visitors.
A carefully arranged array of large, expensive, sophisticated books artfully arranged on the coffee table never fails to impress your house guests. Doubt they’d be as dazzled by a coffee table display of Kindles.
Too many changes in vocabulary.
We’d have to retire phrases like “every trick in the book,” “bookworm,” “by the book,” and “dog-eared pages.” “Every trick in the Kindle,” or “Kindle-worm” just doesn’t have the same ring.
Show your love of the printed page – buy a few rynski books today!
Photo Credit: urban requiem Flickr via Compfight cc
