The Kindle, one of Amazon.com’s latest gadgets, seems to hold much promise for the lover of reading. Like an iPod for books, the Kindle is an electronic device into which a person can download his or her library of books! Without a ‘back-light’, the books downloadable for the Kindle are not so harmful to the eyes (and in fact, are more like physical books) to read. Indeed, the makers of the Kindle hold that their new creation is the most convenient way to read and store books. It is predicted, even, that the Kindle is the first of many electronic libraries which will eventually become the library of the future. Books with pages and ink are on their way out and the Kindle and its kin are on their way in, it seems.
However, as students in an Ethics and Technology class, we know Kindles cannot take over without certain consequences and ramifications. Indeed, according to Borgmann, reading is ‘realizing’ cultural information (information for reality), and thus, changing how we read can affect how we interpret reality. Borgmann also states that reading is important because it is a ‘focal experience’ which allows one to be connected intimately with the certain aspect of reality that a book highlights. Both the knowledge and the imagination of the reader, along with the quality of the book, are critical to how a piece of literature relates one to reality.
How, then, would the Kindles affect reading and how the reader is related to reality? It is true that the books the Kindle provides contain the same stories as physical books do (word for word). A reader could bring his knowledge and (arguably) his imagination to a classic work of literature on the Kindle in nearly the same way as he does with a ‘real’ book. Yet there is something ironic and hypocritical about using a technological device (conveying information as reality) to read a book that is supposed to relate a person back to reality. In one sense, the ‘e-book’ the person is reading (if it is good literature) can, if the human mind is a willing participant, conjure up thoughts about the nature of life and the world that would provide a focal experience for that person which would become crucial to his understanding of reality. Yet, what the person is reading is not a book but technological information suggesting the book. If the person takes the ‘e-book’ he is reading as a 'real' book, though he may be connecting to reality in one way (through reading) he is disconnecting from reality in another. Thus, if, indeed, the Kindle becomes the new library, a ‘trade off’ of sorts would occur within the minds of all readers, who would be both connecting to and disconnecting from reality all at once. Would this ‘trade off’ be worth the conveniences of the Kindle? Why wouldn’t someone just pick up a physical book and read it? In doing so, the person would only be connecting further with reality instead of both connecting to and disconnecting from it.
Furthermore, I believe the Kindle would affect reading negatively because it creates a sort of disembodied experience which, Dreyfus has shown us, is detrimental to the mental heath of human beings . With the Kindle providing the library of the future, never again could one walk into a physical library and experience all the sensual stimuli that it provides: the smell of old scripts, the feel of parchment pages, the sight of personalized dedication pages, the sound of others searching the shelves with you, etc. The embodied action of going into a library and all that it entails is crucial to the experience of reading, not only because it connects one to reality but also because it is easier to discern the different messages about life and the world that each book provides. The Kindle displays every document in exactly the same format, making it more difficult mentally to differentiate between one work and the next. Truly, despite the fact that it saves time, space, and trees, I would much rather gather cultural information by reading a book than reading what appears to be a book from a Kindle.
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