Must Everything be Digital?!

At 30 my earliest music memories involve cassettes. The first I remember owning is Bon Jovi’s New Jersey. I also remember the excitement of getting bootleg copies of Aerosmith’s Pump and Guns and Roses’ Appetite for Destruction from a friend for my 12th birthday. Even then all you needed was scotch tape and a double player to steal some music.

Apparently CDs have been around since the late 70’s and the first CD player was released by Sony in 1982. I couldn’t tell you the first CD I bought but I assure you it was probably sometime mid-90. If the rise of the compact disk has led to the fall of the cassette does this mean that the rise in digital music will lead to the fall of the compact disk? I was late to the world of digital music; I was given a 1st generation iPod nano for Christmas 2006. It took about a year but I moved all of my CDs over to iTunes and after backing them up to an external hard drive have sold them in advance of their complete downfall.

It seems that DVDs and books may be heading for the same fate as CD’s. You can already download movies on iTunes and Netflix has many movies available to play instantly rather than wait for snail-mail. But digital books?!

I love books. I rarely read a book more than once with the exception of a handful of absolute favorites. Despite this I buy them, new. I like the feel of a new book-the crack of the spine as you open it, the smell of the new pages. I don’t keep them. I don’t need to be surrounded by them as affirmation that I am intelligent and capable of reading. I generally pass them on to friends and family, sell them in yard sales, or donate them. I realize this is a waste of money considering I can borrow them for free at the library, yet my Amazon wish list is made up almost entirely of books that I will happily wait until Christmas to have wrapped under the tree waiting for me.

Will I and others like me move to digital books? I already read the newspaper online (is it really still a newspaper without paper and if not then what?). I actually prefer the online version to the actual print version. I never liked newspapers though. I’ve always thought them cumbersome and difficult to finagle in buses and planes without hitting the people around you.

I really don’t see myself reading digital books. No spine cracking. No pretty cover. I admit I am one of those people that will at least pick a book up if it has an interesting name or cover (I use the same process for picking wine). How will I pick books in the digital world?

Late last year Amazon released Kindle, which allows users to download an entire book in less than one minute. It also enables users to download blogs and newspapers, is wireless and weighs less than a pound. Imagine if you weren’t limited to the 20-something titles that Hudson News carried at the airport. I’m still forcing my way through John Grisham’s The Appeal because I feel guilty for paying full price at the airport on my last business trip. I had brought The Memory Keepers Daughter with me on the trip but finished it before the return flight. For this reason I must admit even I am a bit intrigued by this new little gadget though maybe just for travel.