The young man wanted a leather book. One with an old world feel and the quiet scent of a college library. He wanted to cut the pages out.
As he walked in the store, he carried a small box, which he promply opened to display his wife’s Christmas gift, a new Apple iPad. His intention, he explained, was to buy a nice leather book that he could hollow out as a case for his wife to hold while reading.
Electronic reading: the iPad
My heart breaks a little with each disfiguring of a book, but I sold him a couple of tooled leather hardbacks of a size that would accomodate the electronic reader. The extra book was to cut on as practice. Ouch.
I have contended that books will survive because a percentage of readers enjoy the feel and texture of the printed page. It never occurred to me that paper and plastic could coexist. A quick internet search revealed a number of leather-book style cases already on the market at under $40.
Even as I reluctantly sold the volumes to the young man, I imagined he would do a good job creating an in-book space for the iPad, and his wife would be pleased – not only with the new-fangled electronic book reader-do-everything-iPad – but with her husband’s creativity as well.
Half paper, half electronic. Sort of like cyborg half-man, half-robot. The science-fiction titles she downloads should be a natural, and how ironic is it that the leather bound volumes to be hollowed are both history books, about the Old West?