JENNINGS: Some things should not go digital

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July 23, 2010

Anonymous The Journal-Register The Journal-Register Fri Jul 23, 2010, 01:33 AM EDT

ALBION —

Amazon — the nation’s leading online bookseller — announced this week that e-books for its proprietary reader, Kindle, have outpaced sales of traditional paperbound books. This could spell disaster for the backpack and bookshelf industries, as people forego those heavy musty books for a sleek thin-line electronic reader. Soon, the fear of paper cuts will be eliminated and garage sales filled with used romance novels will be gone as well. The world will be a better place.

Of course, even though Amazon claims e-books are outpacing traditional books, I still don’t know anybody who owns a Kindle, which means either I hang around with a lot of people that don’t read much, or that the Kindle craze has not hit Orleans County yet.

Whatever the case is, e-books are a good thing. Anybody who had a huge record or tape collection understands how inconvenient it was to drag new music around with you. Now I have 8,652 songs on my iPod, which is like 752 of the old cassette tapes — that means I would have had the entire back seat of my car filled with those ugly cassette carriers. I probably never would have been able to find a particular Todd Rundgren song.

It only makes sense for things to go digital; it’s better for the environment and it’s more convenient. Maybe it will bring down the price of college textbooks since the cost of college isn’t getting any cheaper.

As of today, many things have successfully converted to digital, such as bank and billing statements. I don’t miss the pile of bills and having to scramble looking for the darn return envelopes that came with them. Even though many of my bills are paid electronically, there seems to be no shortage of junk mail, which is all right because I am friends with a couple local postal workers.

There are some things I miss that were on paper, like the big score sheets for bowling. It seemed like it took forever to figure out the score, but it was a lot easier to add a few pins and not be caught. Now the only sport that is easy to cheat is golf, but I imagine they will eventually come up with an electronic scoring system that registers every time the ball is hit. I am not looking forward to that day.

What I will miss most is the newspaper, sometimes affectionately called the “fish-wrap.” Book doesn’t have the name “paper” in it (OK, maybe “paperbacks” do). Newspapers were meant to be in paper form, not electronic. I mean, can you imagine a kid throwing Kindles from his bicycle in the morning? What about the guy standing on the street corner yelling, “Extra, extra, read all about it!” What will become of him?

Most importantly, I worry about all of the broken glasses and teacups that weren’t carefully wrapped in newspaper. This will kill the already fragile housing market because people will be afraid to move out of fear that all their good china will get smashed.

Let’s face it, getting rid of all those smelly books is a good thing, but a world without newspaper is a world I don’t want to live in.

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