I broke my book. My e-reader half-froze, one portion of the screen hairline-cracked and unresponsive. I'm not exactly sure how, but I was hardly careful with it, stuffing it into bags and pockets alongside keys and other awkward objects. I probably sat on it; I certainly dropped it often. I broke my book; it was no longer readable. I missed the stories on it immediately.
I didn't lose them, however; they came back to me with a new device, supplied quickly and for free by the Large Corporation. Not just the stories, but my place in them, and the same dog-ears and scribblings in the margins. Within minutes I was reading the same stories again, from the same place. I lost a couple of days, but none of my bookmarks, secure (for now, this time) in the cloud. Ghost books, revived.
The new e-reader is not like the old one. It doesn't have the scars of the old one – the coffee stain on the corner, the crack in the casing where I fell off my bike – and I have yet to rim it with gaffer tape to cover the logo of the Large Corporation (it's not personal, it's just a bit much having its logo at the top of every page). I haven't meddled with the code yet either. I must do that soon. It's a little like writing your name in the front of a book, setting the screensaver. I hate Harriet Beecher Stowe – I need to change that.
My e-reader is more like a book than I expected, in all the ways I know books to be special. For their role as bearers of memory, companions on adventures, for the experiences we encode – sometimes quite literally engrave – into them. And losing the e-reader felt something like losing a book too.
No comments:
Post a Comment