This is kind of incongruous, coming as it does on the heels of yesterday’s remark that I really don’t like living here in the future, but I was somewhat excited this morning to have my first in-the-wild encounter with one of those Kindle electronic-book gadgets everybody’s been talking about. It was in the hands of a well-dressed older woman sitting a few rows ahead of me on the train.

And why, you may be asking, would a self-confessed semi-Luddite late-adopter like myself be thrilled to glimpse a device that signifies yet another step away from my precious Way Things Used to Be? Well, partly it was just the novelty of actually seeing an object that I’ve heard so much about but which has been, up until now, only an abstraction. That whole experience of “oh, there’s one of those things!” That’s always fun. But what really pushed my buttons was a fleeting sense that I’d somehow stumbled into a Star Trek episode. Seriously. Even though I’ve seen plenty of photos of the Kindle (obviously, since I identified it easily enough; I even recognized it as a Kindle 2 instead of the earlier model), I’ll be damned if my first thought wasn’t, “Hey, that woman is looking at one of those thingies Picard was always using on Next Gen!” I’ve been saying for years that the world seems to be inevitably becoming more like Star Trek; here we have another piece of evidence in support of that theory.

So, to review, I don’t like living in the future because I’m a nostalgic bastard who prefers the past, but I was excited to see a futuristic device because it resembled a prop seen on a 20-year-old television show that was set… in the future.

Yeah, I’m confused, too. Welcome inside my head.

Anyhow, this seems like a good time to finally address a topic I’ve been thinking about off and on for several years, namely the future of print. I’ve been hearing for at least a decade now that the days of people reading dried, colored pigments smeared on flat bits of ground-up trees are numbered, that just as soon as the right hardware platform comes along, we’re all going to abandon good old-fashioned books in favor of some kind of digital reading device, just as the ubiquitous iPod has mostly killed off the compact disc as the primary way we store and enjoy music. I don’t doubt that some kind of similar paradigm shift for printed matter is approaching, although I’m dubious as to whether the Kindle is going to be the catalyst that finally triggers it, or that the shift itself is going to be as big as e-book proponents say it is. I firmly believe that books, at least, will endure, while conceding that newspapers and periodicals seem to be headed for extinction.

But that’s not to say I think there won’t be digital books at all; there already are, of course, and I do (rather reluctantly) predict that a sizable (and no doubt growing) percentage of our society’s reading is going to go digital in the very near future. It may surprise you, given my usual attitude about change and technology, to learn that I’m not entirely opposed to the idea. I can see some definite advantages to e-books.

The biggest attraction for me personally is the chance to reclaim some physical space in my house. I currently own over 1,400 volumes, which I’m certain is a hell of a lot of books by most anybody’s standards. A few years ago, that insane number would’ve been a source of great pride for me, but the sad truth I’ve finally managed to admit to myself is that I really don’t enjoy having all those books. As you can probably imagine, 1,400 books occupy a pretty large footprint, even when they’re packed tightly together inside bankers boxes and stacked neatly against a wall in the basement, as mine are. I used to dream of someday having a spacious home library with built-in floor-to-ceiling shelving, something like you may remember from the movie Beauty and the Beast, but cold reality has a way of chipping away at such fancies, and I’ve at last come to realize that’s a pretty unlikely scenario. Instead of a library, what I’ve actually got is a whole bunch of possessions that rarely see the light of day — it pains me to admit that I haven’t even read most of those books, and I doubt that I’ll ever get around to re-reading many of the ones I have — but which require the sacrifice of a big room in my basement and the worry of what happens to them if I have a pipe burst down there, which is always a possibility in an old house like mine.

If I were to take my reading digital, I could probably condense that entire collection down to a couple of flash-memory cards that are each smaller than a cracker. To have my basement back and be free of all that stuff… well, let’s just say it’s a very appealing possibility.

That said, there would be downsides for me, and my loyal readers probably know me well enough to guess what they are. I would miss the sensual aspects of actual paper books: the smell, the weight, the texture of the pages, and the history — both personal and otherwise — that inevitably attaches itself to physical objects. I don’t yet own a digital music player, partly because I simply haven’t gotten around to getting one, but also because, at some fundamental level, I am just not comfortable with the thought of transforming things that have always been tangible — printed text, physical recordings, photographs — into intangible assemblies of data. I worry about what happens to your music collection or your library or whatever when a hard drive gives up the ghost, or some microscopic connection in a memory card breaks. “Just back it up,” you say. Well, yes, of course… but backups still won’t eliminate my psychological discomfort with possessions — books, songs, whatever — that I can’t touch. People develop genuine relationships with actual things, but not so much with easily deleteable information. Anyone who knows a teenager can probably see how much less music seems to matter to them than it did to earlier generations; they see it as a fungible commodity, no big deal, just background noise to be purged whenever you get bored with it, and I’m convinced it’s because music for them is only data.

In a wider sense, I worry about what it will do to our society when things that ought to be enduring become things that are inherently effervescent. Will literature and music and movies have any value anymore when they’re all just bits and bytes? And what if there’s some civilization-shaking catastrophe? Paper books could survive if the worst-case scenario were to happen and the electricity stopped flowing for good. Something of our art and thoughts would remain for the future. But if all that we are, as a society, becomes electronic, what happens when there’s no juice to power the playback unit? Or even just when the file format changes? I hate to think that our civilization could be lost because we’d digitized our culture.

Bringing this back down to earth, let me tell you a little anecdote: when my grandmother died a few years ago, as I helped my father clean out her old house, I came across a cache of ancient Life magazines, a few World War II-era books, and some assorted ephemera like ration stamps and letters. I spent days poring over this material, fascinated by it because of its historical significance, and feeling connected to my late grandmother because it had been her stuff, handled by her fingers. I could smell her perfume lingering in some of the pages. I could imagine her as a young woman, tearing out the ration stamps as she made up her shopping list for the week, wondering how she was going to put together menus if she couldn’t get this or that; and then I saw her later in the evening, sitting in her easy chair and catching up on the war news through the articles in those magazines. It was a profound experience, and it was possible because the items I was looking through were real. They had a physical presence which had continued 60 years beyond their creation.

I simply can’t imagine future generations having the same experience with a digital file, and that makes me sad.

That said, however, I’m still tempted by that vision of having another usable room in my basement…