Will This Make You Reconsider Getting A Kindle? I Hope So.

In his post “Will this make you get a Kindle? I hope so.” below, Blaze blogger Jonathon Seidl reveals that he is pining for us to rush out and purchase a Kindle e-book reader. I am afraid I must ask you to reconsider that purchase – even though Kindles are now cheaper – because the Kindle presents us with a terrible dilemma:

I can’t judge you.

Case in point: If you invite me over to your house for, say, cocktails or salad I will immediately gravitate to your bookshelf. From there I can make a potentially accurate assessment of your background, interests and political leanings which I can then use to form a character evaluation and judgment of some kind. This comes in very handy and saves me a lot of time.

However, if you invite me over your house for cocktails or salad and all you have is a Kindle sitting on your coffee table I am completely in the dark. Flummoxed. I can not assess what your background, interests or political leanings are. All I am able ascertain is that you fronted the bucks for a Kindle.

An example: While you’re mixing a gin gimlet I meander over to your bookshelf and notice that you have every lousy book Donald Trump ever pooped out. Based on that observation I know enough to temper my opinion of The Donald while in your presence. I would not know this if all you had was a Kindle. I might say something regrettable like, “Mother of Zeus, I can’t stand that guy.” Then you take offense and put too much lime juice in my gimlet.

There are other factors too:

• I can hand a book to someone. I can’t hand a digital thingy to someone.
• Books don’t need electricity for me to read them. If the North Koreans detonated an Electromagnetic Pulse weapon overhead and destroyed all electronic devices, well,  you’d sure regret not having a book right about then.
• Old books have a nice smell. Old Kindles don’t, unless you leave them somewhere musty. In which case they’re ruined anyway.

I’m sorry to rain on Jonathon’s parade, but I have decided today is Contrarian Tuesday.