I am a huge fan of real books. That said, I do love my Kindle. (I facetiously refer to books now as "single-use Kindles.") In my teenage years I worked in several university libraries, including in the cataloging department of the University of Michigan library. For a year I was the assistant librarian at an academic architecture and engineering library (30,000 volumes) -- a very good job for an engineering student to have. One of my guilty pleasures was putting on the white cotton gloves and leafing through Palladio's I qvattro libri di architettura printed in Venice in 1588. We also had large folio books (20-40 inches wide, 30-50 inches tall, 4-6 inches thick) from the early 1900s containing large, detailed engineering drawings of bascule bridges and structural systems for things that often didn't exist anymore.
My own rare books collection includes: Thuvia, Maid of Mars (first edition), The White House Cook Book (1893), The White House Music Book (1898), Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (first edition), and Told by Uncle Remus (1905). The latter, of course, is one of a few books upon which the Disney film Song of the South was based. And yes, it appears to be written in an early form of Ebonics -- as blatantly racist disrespectful as it could possibly be. I also have the Dec. 1969 issue of National Geographic.
This is the joy of reading. I agree with the synesthetic gestalt of a physical book. The leather and board of Palladio's cover had a distinct smell. The paper bore the subtle striations of the drying racks used back then, and the rough-cut edges. Toward the end there was a series of margin notes made in iron-gall ink, dated by calligraphy to the early 1800s. At that point the book was already an antique, and still treated by its owner as a valuable textbook -- now the notes themselves are also antiques.
I also have a coffee-table book on space. And by that I mean it's roughly the size of a coffee table. Yes, I can get the content anywhere, including on the web and in Kindle form. But I cannot get the experience of huge photographic reproductions, and turning pages with both hands. I agree with the Kindle as a very useful way to carry text-only books -- and a lot of them. I like having my Kindle library widely available on several e-reading forms. But I also agree with the complaints about illustrations being missing or uselessly degraded. I deal in information that is most often and most effectively presented in graphical form.
