I know it’s probably not such a big deal…and yet I feel a little sad when I read something like this article in the New York Times — “Kindle Joins a Literary Ritual: Authors Can Autograph It.”
Some people — a few, still, but I bet there’ll be more — are going to book-signings and, since they have no actual book, are getting authors to sign their Kindle instead.
Doesn’t that make you sad?
I kind of agree with David Sedaris who, as he signed the back of one Kindle, wrote, “This bespells doom.” (The article suggests he wrote this in “mock horror,” but I wonder…)
I suddenly realize why, even though I enjoyed the various incarnations of Star Trek, I never really wanted to live in their world even though I would definitely love space travel and exploring new worlds and so on. But those people had no things. They kind of floated around — rattled around? — in their very empty rooms, with everything on computer and nothing in their hands.
So sure, get authors to sign your Kindle — until there’s no space on it or it’s entirely black with ink and you have no author signatures visible at all. Or get them to sign one of those horrible little screens like the FedEx or UPS people make you sign, and store the signatures in the Kindle too.
And then your memory crashes and you lose everything.
I can’t stand the thought of losing the physical paper books. I’m afraid I’m never going to want to live somewhere like the crew quarters on the Enterprise. I’m always going to need a space that has stuff like this instead:
You are not alone.
Although, I’m completely cool with electronic media. I don’t get attached to stuff and would happily have all my books on the eReader.
But I know many many people who feel like you do about it, and I often find them in my favorite sci-fi books (keeping a sentimental attachment to the old books): Heinlein, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller…
I like to think there’s space in my world for both… but if I was going to have an author sign something, it would be a paper copy of their book. Kean Soo, author of one of my favourite graphic novels, even drew me a little Jellaby when he signed my book… It wouldn’t have fit on a Kindle! (That said… are there even graphic novels for Kindle?)
Almost makes you think you need an autograph book for your favorite authors, like kids take to Disney to have signed by the characters… or something. Bill Gates wrote a lot about this in his “Road Ahead” book in the 90′s — no artwork, just images projected on walls, no physical media, everything just stored as a file somewhere….
It doesn’t work for me, and here’s why. Media changes. It’s not just about how long a CD drive could read the data on a CD before it breaks down — it’s about how long before the CD drive is obsoleted by something else, and I have to decide whether to pitch all my electronic “stuff” or reformat it. And maybe I’ve just been reading too much apocalyptic fiction lately, but I can’t help but think that someday, somehow, the grid is going to fail us. The printed word is going to survive that day an awful lot better than the digitized.
I think you’re absolutely right, Nicola. I remember hearing our CBC radio morning announcer talk about how he translated all his music to computer files (that he could play on his iPod), and then sold all his CDs. All I could think — having worked in records management for years — was, “And when your computer crashes, you’ve lost everything!”
The acknowledgement in the Records crowd is that it takes only three generations of media for records to become unreadable. Sometimes that’s three generations for the same format!
I’m totally with you. Give me paper books, all the way. Kindle or other electronic files will be backups for the books — not the other way around. And I won’t get involved in having to rebuy all 2000+ books every time there’s a change in electronic format!!
I love books – paper books. And I love getting books autographed. I really don’t see how that could translate to a Kindle, but hey, what do I know? Don’t have one and don’t want one.
Me either. At some point, I might get an e-reader of some kind, as a backup to the books. (As I mentioned to Nicola in the other comment, I won’t have it the other way around — where the electronic books are the primary books and paper is a mere backup.) An e-reader could make it easier to take a lot of books with you on a trip, or something; I could see that. And you can get a lot of out-of-print books in electronic format now, that you never could before. So I can see a place for them. But as a records person, I’m horrified at how easy it would be to lose these books as formats change.