Thanks, Rasha - very nice to know that not everything I think / believe / feel, etc, is merely an artifact of advancing age (though that's always an important hypothesis to explore ...) Thanks as well for filling out the aesthetic side of the discussion. I couldn't agree more. I would add a bit by saying that the heft and feel of some books, in particular, seem to me to be so fitting to my hand as a reader, it's just a delightful experience. The same is true, it seems to me, of any well-designed tool or artifact. Ultimately, they fit our preferences, sensibilities, and habits as embodied beings, not simply "Cartesian minds on a stick," as one education colleague characterized some earlier, cognitivist assumptions about our students and ourselves. In this direction, I would add: the Kindle is also enjoyable "to have and to hold" - in my experience, that is, it _feels_ good in the hand/s, is (usually) easily readable, etc. From what more experienced users tell me, the redesign for the 2.0 version introduced a number of very helpful improvements. It would, indeed, be very nice to have one - but at this stage, they are still a bit pricey for my budget. (The best of all possible worlds is a both/and, not an either/or.) Again, thanks! And enjoy! - c. On 5/7/09 5:46 AM, "Rasha A. Abdulla" <rasha@aucegypt.edu> wrote:
Call me old fashioned, but I love the feel of a book, and the smell of a book, and the notes or lack thereof that I make on a book. I like the fact that I know how to reach the graph I want based on how the page looks, and the pages before and after look, and the part of the book that the page is in looks. And I love the feeling of flipping the page.
Don't get me wrong, I will still enjoy a Kindle if only for the convenience of the sheer volume of information literally at my finger tips, but I still enjoy my paper books!!