How You Like That Kindle Now?

TAC - How You Like That Kindle Now? by Rod Dreher

I’m wondering how all those people in New York, New Jersey, and other places without electrical power are feeling now about their Kindles and iPads-as-readers? It’s fantastic to be able to put all kinds of books on your electronic device, but when you don’t have power, where is your library? It disappears — and it disappears at a time when you really need it, too.

My iPad died literally as we were about to board the plane for France. The people at the Apple store in Paris examined it, and said it was an electrical problem. The iPad is well and truly dead. Fortunately, I backed it up the night before I left, so I won’t have lost any books. But all the books I’d loaded on the thing to read in Paris were not available to me. It occurs to me that all the books I’ve bought to read on my iPad’s Kindle app will not be available to my children to read one day when they are grown, or my grandchildren, in the way that all the old books on the shelf at my mom and dad’s house are available to us.

I’m rethinking this whole buy-books-electronically thing...