I just breezed through Dr. Barrett Mosbacker’s “Welcome to the Library. Say Goodbye to Books” article from the Christian School Journal:
First, consider the positive. You can have gads of information at your fingertips perpetually. The price of work could eventually approach $0 (of course this would do a number on royalties, so it could not be $0, but it would surely be a less involved process than making a book). Just think about all the space that it would save on our trips to the beach—the ones where I take along 15 books just so that I can have them. I think that it also has some really interesting applications for textbooks (these are the books that I am most interested in eliminating). Most Math or Science textbooks might work well on the Kindle. They are massively expensive and this electronic format—especially in Math—could enable students to avoid paper altogether, and check work more easily.
There are arguments against the Kindle. First, there is the romantic argument. I love books. There are some that I love so much that you would have to pry them out of my cold dead hand. This romance, however, should not be a deciding factor. I have no proof that the Kindle will destroy the world. Someone was probably making this romantic argument when scrolls were being replaced. Second, there is my Fahrenheit 451concern. What if this leads to no books and then some pesky tyrant turns off the electricity, thus making literacy impossible. Ok, maybe I worry about stuff like this too much, but I think that we should always keep about 50 of the best books in hardcopy in our houses at all times—just in case. Finally, however, is a real concern. I think that this could further play into the idea (the ubiquitous idea) that life is disembodied, completely ethereal and Gnostic. The more we divorce ourselves from the world of bricks and mortar, of wood and wheat, the worse off we are and the less we seem to care for the world that God made.
It is on the Kindle—a new reading device from Amazon that can store over three thousand books. You can read them whenever you like. The device looks like it is about the size of a sheet of paper. A few schools have begun to use Kindle’s exclusively. They have no books (or do they?). I would love to hear what others have to think about this. I have some deep concerns, but I also think that—like the Internet—there are some really interesting upsides as well.
First . . . .
