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A future without books

J.P. Devine

"There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love."

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-- Christopher Morley

It's 2020. Max is standing outside school with Emily. He's clearly so in love that he stammers ... "Can I carry your Kindle home from school?"

A Kindle?

It could come to that. Books, as we have always known them, those big thick, gorgeously covered best sellers, awkwardly shaped school books and steamy novels that used to come in brown paper bags, are now being hawked on thin metallic boxes like menus from "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Ladies and gentlemen: The eBook Reader.

Ms. Garcia has a Kindle eBook Reader from Amazon. Joe has an iPad from Apple. Bob has a Nook from Barnes and Noble, and Jimmy just bought a Micro Cruz Reader from Borders. These folks are trail blazers, opinion makers, readers on the cutting edge of space-age technology.

In case you've been out of town on a Tea Party bus tour, or you've refused to come in from the beach where you've been reading the latest Jonathan Franzen best seller, there is something you need to know. Okay, if you're-reading Jonathan Franzen, you probably already have an eBook Reader. But if you're still sitting on a lawn chair in your driveway, reading a library book, you need to start preparing your Christmas list. Your grandkids are going to ask for an ebook reader.

The publishing world's hair is on fire across the country because of this phenomena. If you're an eighth-grader you should know that you guys may be the last generation to hold a real book in your hand.

Pay attention. See that slim metallic box tucked under the traveler's arm in the bus depot, train stations and airport lounges? That's probably an ebook reader. They are the most ubiquitous gadgets to explode on the landscape since the cell phone roared in.

Publishing houses are gearing up to be part of the electronic book revolution. The competition for your literary buck is intense, and we may be watching a modern version of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451," in which books aren't actually being burned, simply declared passé.

For my Luddite friends who still own a library card and are packing paperback books to take back to Florida for the winter, let me explain. With an ebook reader built by any one of the above, you can store hundreds of books on a slim metallic box with a touch screen. You can put "War And Peace" on one alongside "Eat, Pray, Love."

Not everyone is a disciple. She who buys books by the bag and reads two a week, sniffs at the idea. She likes turning the pages, hearing them whisper as they float by. She likes the sound of a book closing, the soft thud it makes as it hits the coffee table. The smell of the paper and the art of the jacket appeal to her. These are the aesthetic reasons. I have my fears.

For instance, should this literary nouvelle vogue become a tsunami, making real books as obsolete as penny gum machines, think first of the domestic consequences. What will we do with all of those bookshelves? They'll sit there accumulating dust, looking for all the world like the remains of a foreclosed drug store. And what of those wonderful, artistic book markers? Oh Lord!

As for myself, I suppose I could display my high school athletic awards, except I didn't win any. I don't even have a bowling trophy. Here's a horrible thought. How do you go to an author's reading and get him to autograph your Kindle? This is the end of the collectors' item.

What of the future? Imagine a future school where all the kids have only Kindles or Nooks, and my young friend Liam keeps a hard bound real book in his locker. Word will leak out. Liam has a book. He will be ostracized as a Luddite. Girls will think of him as dorky. The kids will laugh at him as he sits alone in the cafeteria thumbing through "War And Peace."

"What goes around, comes around" someone once said, Herbert Hoover, I think. One day Liam's children will find that book in an attic trunk. As a precious heirloom, it will bring a fortune, and all will be envious.

Gather ye real books while ye may, old Robert Herrick should have said. Nothing lasts forever.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.