the nook

A few days ago, I received an email about the nook, a new e-reader from Barnes & Noble. For the past 48 hours, I have been googling images of the nook, reading articles about it, imagining the way all of my favorite books will look displayed on the touchscreen, comparing it to the kindle, and fantasizing about how sleek and heavy it would feel in my hands.

I am in like.

Don't get me wrong. When it comes to books, I am usually a purist. I like the distinct characters of real books. I love the way each book is different in terms of size, cover art, age, wear, etc. I love the way books are physically altered by belonging to someone. I dog-ear pages, underline, crush books to my chest, sleep with them under my pillow. The nook is so fancy and expensive, I would be afraid to live with it the way I live with my other books.

Nonetheless, the nook has captured my interest. I am sure their stellar marketing has had a role in my obsession. I have spent a very long time at bn.com, watching a video about the nook, reading a checklist of its features, and taking the 360 tour of the device. That will do it.

Moreover, as a book lover, I am attracted to anything that is related to literature and reading. This is why I buy so many bags and T-shirts at The Strand - because they are "book-related" purchases.

This being said, the nook would be a very impractical purchase for me. First of all, it is $259. I could do a lot of things with that much money, including buy several books. Furthermore, there is nothing I can do with a nook that I cannot do with a real book. Nook has long battery life so that you can read for days! With Nook, you can lend books to your friends! With Nook, you can bookmark pages and even highlight text! All of these snazzy electronic features offer me nothing that I cannot enjoy with the sorts of books I already know and love.

I wonder if the nook will do to reading and booksellers what iPods did to music and the music industry. With the boom of iTunes and the death of music stores, I now experience music differently. I used to understand music in terms of albums: the CDs I carried around in my bag, the release dates I eagerly awaited, the jackets and liner notes I pored over and memorized. Now I have so much music at my fingertips all at once that I don't have the same full sense of artists - the development of their work from album to album. I play a few tracks, skip a few. The acquisition of music has been stripped of its formality, its ritual. I don't love music any less - it's just different.

I doubt that the nook will have a comparable impact on the bookselling and publishing world. I am biased; I do not believe anything can change the centrality of books (the kind with two covers and pages in between) to our culture.

Books (of the non-electronic variety) are not going anywhere without a fight. After all, books have an extraordinary knack for perseverance. In Book V of The Prelude, William Wordsworth muses about the fragility of books. He wonders wonders why precious ideas and stories are stored in such perishable vessels. He writes, "Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad/ Her spirit, must it lodge in shrines so frail?"

I do not mean to suggest Wordsworth would be a fan of the more durable nook, but I do wonder:

Isn't the perishable nature of books part of what makes them so wonderful? They are just sheets of paper stuck together, yet they endure all sorts of accidents, travels, and lengths of time. They get dusty, tear, come apart at the binding, are taped back together, survive spillages and falls.

That's a lot to compete with, nook.

Still, it is very pretty.