Packing for a flight to northern B.C. recently, I dithered over which books to put in the limited space of my carry-on luggage. I would need a few; it’s a seven-hour ferry ride from Prince Rupert to Haida Gwaii. Someone pointed out that what I needed was an e-reader. Hadn’t even thought of that but, of course, that would’ve solved everything. It was too late to go out and buy one but on the plane, I began to wonder if the time had come for me to get over my loyalty to books made of paper. Then, in a cluttered living room of a B&B in Masset, I realized a side to the e-readers vs real books debate I hadn’t considered before.
Copper Beech Guest House, owned by poet and novelist Susan Musgrave, had a window overlooking the harbor and either side of this view, shelves stuffed with novels, memoirs and chapbooks of poetry. The coffee table was piled with books about photography and painting and history. When a small group of us gathered for breakfast in the morning, I was grateful to have these books within arm’s reach. I don’t like to talk to people, especially not strangers, until I’ve had my first cup of coffee, and browsing through a cookbook not only stoked my appetite for the eggs frying in the kitchen – it also provided a way to avoid small talk.
Over a second coffee (I was more sociable now) I told my fellow lodgers about my book-packing problems. We discussed the pros and cons of e-readers and agreed they were undoubtedly convenient. On the other hand, wasn’t it true that part of the draw of travel was to “get away,” and one of the things we liked to get away from was time spent facing electronic screens?
Not only that, rooms like the one we were in wouldn’t have the same ambience if there were only an e-reader or two on otherwise bare shelves. Sure, a guest would be able to hold in one hand all the volumes in this house – but she would then miss the weight of a book on her lap, the feel of its pages and the realization that other travelers from around the world had turned those same pages before her.
I’ll be trying out e-reading soon, I know, and I’ll probably become a fan of its convenience. But when I arrange a stay at bed-and-breakfast in a distant town, I’ll be looking for a place with comfy chairs and shelves loaded with the kind of books that have real spines.
Oh, the books I packed: A classic, Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, a mystery, The Lincoln Lawyer, by Michael Connelly – and Fodor’s New York City, because on the ferry ride home, I wanted to do a little research for our next trip. No decision yet on what kind of reading I’ll pack.
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At a recent gathering of “Information Storage Systems” the speaker walked out on stage, and dropped on the top of the podium, a 500 year old copy of the “King James Bible” and then opened it and started reading from the book in old English, he stopped….
He then said: “Ladies and Gentlemen what do you have today that can compete with this….”
So we have nothing. We have glass CD’s that might last 50 years and even after that, we need a huge system to decipher and then make readable the information stored..
Oh well….
That’s a good point. I still have old technology on the shelf — VCR tapes, floppy disks — that I don’t want to throw out but can no longer access. It’s possible to convert, but seems like a lot of bother. On the other hand, I still have on my shelf the book of fairy tales I read as a kid.
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