If 2011 is the year of the eBook, it might also be considered the year of the eBook rant, as editorials declare their undying loyalty to leather tomes. eBooks just don’t compare, they say. How can you curl up with an eBook, they ask? eBooks just don’t feel the same in your hand, they don’t have the same texture, they don’t have that bookish smell. Sherman Alexie even called them “elitist.”
60 minutes’ veteran commentator Andy Rooney recently weighed in on eBooks, and guess what? He doesn’t like them. Says Andy, “I like having these books behind me. I can’t imagine not being able to pick up a book and thumb through it.” Neither can we, Andy; neither can we.
Of course we librarians and library patrons certainly know all about the special feel and smell of books; after all, that charming old mystery you just checked out may have been enjoyed by upwards of three hundred other readers over the years, including bathers, doodlers, smokers and vivisectionists. So we were pleased to hear about the development of a new prototype eReader designed to preserve the feel and smell of well-loved book: the Spindle™.
Weighing in at a carpal-tunnel inducing 3.2 pounds and fully dog-earable, the Spindle™ comes loaded with a full array of comfortingly bookish apps, including:
- Spindle ex-lib edition: if you could only smell this picture. Image courtesy Rikomatic & Kevin
- Yellowing
- Foxing
- Missing Pages
- Coffee Stains
- Mystery Stains
- Annoying Marginalia
- Schmutz
- Inappropriate Bookmark
- New Book Smell
- Old Book Smell
- Cabbage Smell
- Smoking Household
- Stroll in the Rain
- Dropped in the Tub
The Spindle™ comes with a chipped dust jacket, or in a special ex-lib edition with stamping throughout, bound in a distressed buckram cover handsomely decorated in your choice of abstract motif: Space Race, Olde Scotland or Moon Over Mondrian™. At last, an eBook reader that even Andy Rooney could love!
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