Artifacts

I got an Amazon Kindle for my birthday last month. I did not, at the time, know that this was the perfect gift for me. I love everything about it. I don't miss turning paper pages, or trying to balance different tomes comfortably in bed. I don't miss tagging my page with post it notes.

I really dig the instant delivery of books, and the free samples too. After waking up to the radio playing a snippet of Johnny Depp reading Keith Richard's autobiography the other day, I leapt out of bed and ordered the audiobook online.... for my Kindle. That's gonna be a lot of fun for roadtrips.

Thirteen or more years ago I closed my bookstore in favor of bookbinding and restoration. At that time I became convinced that books as I knew and loved them would become relics, artifacts, if not obsolete. At the time I could not conceive of a more perfect reading mechanism than the Western codex. Today, with the readiness of not only Kindle, but other handheld devices (including phones) for storage and enjoyment of the written word, it does indeed look like paper and board printed books may well become a thing of the past. This makes it all the more important for the book arts to be thrive and be passed on to future generations.

I'm sure I'll have more to say on this.