Technology that needs no batteries, never crashes, is always on

A friend candidly admits he hasn’t read a book since high school. Since he normally gets passed the ‘You-know-you’re-middle-aged-when’ mug if he drops in for coffee, that’s quite a few years without his cracking a book.

There was a time I would have found that incomprehensible.

Books line the shelves in two rooms at home, lie in small piles on the floor and even sit on the couch beside me. Their pages just don’t seem to be turned any more. There never seems to be time now to curl up for a quiet wander through a novel or even to open a cookbook to a favourite recipe.

Everything is online, and computers have information, photos and graphics that can keep Web pages flashing past. Links lead to exploration and onto other sites. RSS feeds provide constant updates on areas of interest, social sites like Facebook link friends across the province or the nation.

Despite the foregoing, I was somewhat shocked last month when Apple boss Steve Jobs said reading is pretty well dead. His statistic was that 40 per cent of Americans last year read one book or less.

My shock wasn’t about the 40 per cent of Americans. It was the realization I might be falling into that category.

I read all the time. It’s my job as well as my avocation. But I no longer am reading books. It seems the thirst for the written word can be slaked at the electronic trough as readily as the volumes that line my shelves. I won’t give them up, even if I have to dust them occasionally, but I worry that a choice has been made almost unconsciously.

This brings up a question about the future of public libraries.

Libraries themselves are millennia old, but public lending libraries we know now are a fairly recent development. They got a big boost in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when Scottish-American businessman Andrew Carnegie donated the money for building thousands of libraries in English-speaking countries.

At the moment, libraries are facing major difficulties finding funds to buy books. At the same time, libraries have to wonder whether they’ll have any patrons to read those books in a decade or two. Politicians are in charge of the taxpayer-funded purse and they are as aware as Jobs that too few people read books.

But politicians should know that it is much too early to give up on books, one of the world’s most reader-friendly packages for conveying information and illuminating minds. Forget Jobs’ comment. It can be tipped on its head to read that 60 per cent of Americans (and Canadians, by extension) do read books.

Yes, many people have turned away from books and magazines paper for most of their daily reading, but try reading an electronic novel on a computer. When it comes to such books, new technology has yet to supplant the tried-and-true.

For comfortable reading, you need something that can be held in both hands, is easily transportable, offers easy scrolling by the eyes without constantly needing to hit a ‘page down’ button, and smells fresh when it is opened.

If it was also the size and weight and shape of a book, required no batteries, never crashed, and was always ‘on’, that is remarkably durable technology, and its lifetime is nowhere near over yet.

Now, I just have to close this laptop and put a book on my lap instead.