Get Thee To A Nunnelly

When Michael Scott (Steve Carrel) of “The Office” talks about paper with that little twinkle in his eye, I admit I get a little choked up. Like Michael, I have an affinity for paper, and I love to hold it in my hands. That’s what she said.

Recently though, I was on the website for Amazon’s “Kindle 2,” and what I saw caused concern in my paper-loving heart. The Kindle is essentially the iPod of books, allowing users to download a wide range of literature and magazines wirelessly—you’ll never need to hold a wonderful, lovable book ever again. Perhaps for techies and Green People, this is a great leap forward for the absurd idea of “paperless paper,” but for all of us who venerate the real thing, the Kindle is just another injury in a long list.

As I watched the instructional video on Amazon, they progressed through the gamut of its features in Steve Jobs-like fashion, and all was going well until they reached the part about the screen. The voice-over claimed that “Kindle’s electronic-ink display reads like real paper,” while “Advanced Paper DISPLAY” ran across the screen and the Kindle displayed a grayscale picture of a woman who didn’t look quite human. After millions of dollars and years of research, the Kindle is an almost-believable approximation of tree pulp.

Of course, one of the immediate implications of something like the Kindle is that it is comparatively tree-friendlier than books. You might even be able to consider the Kindle as Green Technology—if you ignore the environmental costs of manufacturing it as well as the quality of life of the underpaid Chinese laborers who assemble it. Perhaps books are old-fashioned, but at least they biodegrade. Can you put Kindles in the compost heap?

All its technology and environmental politics aside though, the Kindle bothers me most because it ruins the organic experience of reading. To those who might celebrate the Greenness of the Kindle, I say: I don’t care. I don’t care that it saves trees—because a lot more die from advertising, napkins, and the farming techniques of South America. I don’t care that the Kindle’s carbon footprint is less than the thousand books I can fit inside it. I don’t care that it reads like a real book—because I still like real books. I don’t even care that it’s convenient and easy to carry. That sounds like a sales pitch for a handgun.

As part of the Kindle’s advertising, Amazon, without a hint of irony, had Toni Morrison talk about why she likes it. At one point during the three minute clip, the Nobel Prize winning author says, “When you are interactive with a book, that’s what you do, you own it, you can mark it, you can quarrel with it, you can say it’s wrong, you can be overwhelmed by its language or its clarity.” Somehow Morrison connects this idea with the Kindle’s capabilities, though for me, it is those very qualities of a real book that this piece of technology could never capture.

Real books have a physical presence that we have to hold and with which we sometimes grapple or “quarrel.” They have a distinctive smell, and picking an old book off the shelf, you can find notes and underlinings from when you first read it. As your understanding of literature and the world grows, your books mature with you. Yes, the Kindle has an auto-scroll feature, but it’s not going to help the words leap off the page. If anything, they just become flat and confined on the “no-glare” screen.

The Kindle is part of a trend that has contributed to the decline of the art of paper over the last twenty years. With the development of the internet, newspapers and magazines have been left gasping on the deck of popular irrelevancy—even the New York Times, the Holiest of Dailies.

Letter writing has gone the way of the radio. What was, until recently, the modus operandi for distant artistic and scholarly discourse is now mostly used by children sending letters to Santa. The mailbox has become the phone bill or catalogue box. Now that we have a multitude of online communication outlets, what will happen to the love letter (thank you “Sex and the City Movie”)? Now that we have Evite and Paperless Post, what will happen to attractive handwriting? Maybe someday we can read (from our Kindles) “The Collected emails, Myspace comments, Tweets, and online message board comments of Some Famous Author.”

For those still holding out on me, here’s one last thing to think about: You’re sitting with your Kindle in a forest that you might have saved by buying your Kindle. You are near the end of a classic with a surprising ending—say Hemingway’s “A Farwell to Arms”—and just before the best (or, in this case, the worst) part, your Kindle’s battery dies! You are miles away from any electricity, and the only thing going through your head is, “I wish I had a book with me.”

As a functional tool or toy, I don’t mind the Kindle, but we must never conflate it with the experience of real paper. I hope we refuse to let books become expensive antiques. I hope libraries are always sacred places of knowledge and learning, rather than massively inefficient time capsules. As a side note, if you’re looking to buy a Kindle as a gift, buy it now because it will definitely be sold out around Christmas time.





—Staff writer Andrew F. Nunnelly can be reached at nunnelly@fas.harvard.edu.