I'm doing my holiday shopping as I always do: watching for some little adorable thing for myself. What fun is gift-shopping if you don't buy yourself a little something along the way?
I had thought that this might be the year to give myself an e-reader. Imagine carrying a whole library around with you! I've researched them enough to know some of the differences (WiFi / 3G / 4G) and pitfalls (difficult to read in sunlight, mostly black-and-white screens, illustrations sometimes not so great). A nice lady at the mall let me play with the Nook a few months ago, and I liked the look and feel of it very much. And the price is almost right: the basic Kindle is $139, the Nook only slightly more than that, and you can get off-brand readers for under $100.
But I was mooching along downtown on Saturday, with a paperback copy of Tim Robinson's “Connemara” under my arm, and it suddenly hit me: what benefit would an e-reader bring me? It'd weigh the same as my little book. It would serve the same purpose. I bought my copy of “Connemara” for $9.99 from Daedalus Books Online; I could have downloaded the Kindle edition for about the same, so price is a wash. I can write in my book, and tear the endpapers out to make notes, and use it as a coaster; I wouldn't do any of those things with an e-reader (I think some e-readers let you make notes, but surely not with the hectic casualness I scribble in a book). E-readers have batteries that need to be charged up; my little copy of “Connemara” will probably outlive me, sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere, and it will never need to be charged up at all.
It'd be great, of course, to have a hundred books to read in one package. Maybe if I were on a long trip, I suppose. But did I need a hundred books for my Saturday stroll? If I'd had an e-reader, would I have turned from "Connemara" to “Troilus and Cressida,” or “Gravity's Rainbow,” or the Apocrypha, or Emily Dickinson? Maybe. But I spent the day musing over Robinson. He's a little tedious on the surface – so much detail! so many names! – but he builds up his text by accretion, one stone on top of another. He benefits from quiet attentive reading.
So I think maybe I will not buy an e-reader this year. Once they've integrated the e-reader with one or two other things – maybe an MP3 player and a phone and a camera – and brought the price down to the same point, they'll convert me. But not until then.
Now what am I supposed to buy myself for a present?
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