I love to read. In fact, I'm quite sure that I only love to write because I love to read. Creating, toiling away, writing is the work; reading is the reward. Knowing this (and because I just turned 23 a few days ago), a group of my family and friends chipped in to buy me the latest, greatest breakthrough in reading technology: the Amazon Kindle 2. It's an eReader. A digital, wafer-thin physical book-made-from-paper replacement. It can hold about 1,500 books in its memory stores, enough to make the question "What's the one book you'd take with you if you knew you were to be stranded on a deserted island without the hope of rescue?" obsolete. Its screen uses new-fangled eInk technology which arranges and rearranges negatively or positively charged microcapsules into patterns allowing for very low energy consumption (as it only draws power when the pattern needs to be changed, i.e. when you virtually turn a page) while also being very easy on the eyes. The eye-strain problems of the ever-ubiquitous LCD screen are a thing of the past with eInk. (And with my poor-excuses for eyes, that's important.) Though, the drawback is it can only display text and images in grayscale. No color whatsoever. But, since it's an eReader, meant for eBooks, that's hardly an issue. And it's especially easy to forget when you're staring at an electronic display that you'd swear is a printed page, with honest-to-goodness ink stamped on actual paper made from trees. It really is amazing.

But it's not the technology of Amazon's Kindle or the sheer glee of knowing I have the capability to carry around my entire library of literature in the palm of my hand, it's the abstraction of reading itself. Rather, it's the abstraction of what it is to be a book, to own books, to have a library. I know this feeling well, as I've experienced it twice now, first with music, second with movies, but with books it's different. Scrawling some grouping of symbols meant to represent ideas on a physical, portable surface has been a tried-and-true process since, well, the beginning of recorded history. It's this process that recorded history. Music wasn't portable until the 20th Century in any kind of ubiquitous portable format. Movies couldn't be carried around until even later. But books, well, they've been around for a while. They've been transported, the information within them shared for a long, long time. And while the process of creating a book has changed, become streamlined and more modern, the idea of a book is pretty much the same.

And now I'm just giving up on them? As much as I love reading, I love the experience of reading perhaps even more. The smell of new, crisp book pages. The cracking of a book's spine, that visual representation of one's love for a book, showing just how often it finds its way back into one's hands. The feel of the different weights of paper, always unique, always a new challenge to learn the pages' properties. Hell, even the bookmarks and the cover art. But now that I own a Kindle, all of that seems to be a thing of the past. I'm removed from that experience and left with only the ideas inside the book, which, at once, is a very interesting prospect in and of itself and a crying shame.

It's interesting because my focus will be fully on the words, sentences, paragraphs, and the ideas of which they're a part. From what I've noticed thus far, I'm reading faster than I ever had before, and I'm able to read multiple books at once with far more ease than was possible with actual, printed books. But I really do miss the tactile sensation that reading used to provide. The Kindle is cold, devoid of emotion. I can't foresee any future memories of me reading being quite as warm or nostalgic any longer. And though I've not finished a book on my Kindle yet, I can't foresee that moment being as satisfying as it always has been: watching the pages of one's book slowly creep farther and farther to the left on one's bookmark until SLAM, the book cover closes after that last sentence is read, the puff of air enveloping one's head as the closed book rests atop one's chest. With the Kindle, it's merely a press of the Next button as a status bar creeps along the bottom of the drab, grey screen, followed by an unceremonious press of the Home button after that last page is reached. I suppose I could clutch my Kindle close to my chest, but there's no cover art to stare at or heft to feel. Though this process may alleviate the plague of depression I feel every time I finish a book, distancing me somewhat from the emotion of finishing a book, leaving a group of characters. It may at least cut down on the amount of time I'm afflicted since it'll be so easy to start anew with my Kindle pressing ever forward like an emotionless little reading robot.

Apart from the emotional severance, the Kindle also presents an end to the library as I've always seen it. I was never one to display my records or CDs and only own a relatively small amount of DVDs, but books have always been both for reading and for display in my home. I'm proud of my book collection. I want them to be seen, studied, questioned, and debated. I love doing the same to others' collections. But if all of my future book purchases are to be of the digital variety over WhisperSync, stored electronically on Amazon's servers, I suppose my collection has come to an abrupt halt. I'll still be purchasing graphic novels, as there's no replacing those (yet), but novels, literature, anthologies, collected essays, books of poems, will they never reach my bookshelf again? Will Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood and Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs be my last two purchased printed books? I suppose I'll get used to this abstracted definition of book ownership just as I got used to downloading music versus thumbing through CDs in a store and downloading movies or just watching them instantly via the Internet rather than searching through the available discs at my local Best Buy. I suppose.

What I don't think I'll be able to get used to, however, is the idea of pirating books. In the past, I've illegally downloaded myriad MP3s and a few (more than a few) movies. I didn't feel any guilt while, for all intents and purposes, stealing music. I felt a negligible amount of guilt after downloading a film (though, for the most part, I've generally only downloaded films I've already paid to see in theatres and want to/need to see again). But when perusing the pirate market of eBooks available, I was struck with an immediate, adverse disgust with myself. Books, it seems, are the form of artistic media (that are able to be pirated digitally) that I find most precious. I think this has to do with the time investment involved. One song is, what, around a four minute time investment. One album, an hour. One film, an hour and a half on average, three/four hours max. But I could spend weeks with a single book. Sure, the replayability of an album or a movie is greater than a book, but it's that first experience, the first read-through that's so precious. More precious, in fact, than a first listen or a first watch. I can't imagine stealing that. I don't want to.

So, overall, I love the Kindle's execution. How it's evolved the way I read. But this abstraction of reading, well, it's going to take some getting used to. Do they make a "new book smell" candle? That'd probably help. A lot.