Oh, the Children!
Something just occurred to me.
It came in a rush, the kind of certainty you reach when a myriad of facts and thoughts suddenly coalesce into one, and a crystal clear picture of the future suddenly flashes before your eyes.
My (theoretical) child is going to hate books.
They will see books like I see… 8 track tapes. Ugly, inefficient, cumbersome things dimly rememembered from early childhood, but obsolete and gone by the time I was in grade school.
Because that is the future of books, ladies and gentlemen. They are going the way of the dodo.
I was writing just now. I was sitting with my feet up, parallel to my desk. It’s an awkward way to sit, forcing me to half-twist to reach the keyboard and mouse, but if I sit normally with my feet under the desk, the backing of the desk prevents me from extending my legs, and then my syrinx puts me in agony.
So I work in this fucked up position, practically prone, and needed to look up a word’s exact definition (prone, actually) to see if it fit the sentence I was crafting. I do this all the time.
My reference books are on the hutch right atop my desk, within easy reach to a person sitting normally. I reached for volume 2 of my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOEE for short). Having a copy of the SOEE used to mean something. It was the Mercedes of dictionaries, retailing at $150 and coming in 2 heavy volumes, as opposed to the $20 Merriam Webster that most everyone uses.
I am proud of my SOEE. It is such a fine reference, as well as being something of a statement. When someone comes into my library and says “Oh, you have a SOEE?” it instantly tells me a LOT about the person. I tells me that words and books are a huge part of their life, and that they love them dearly. It tells me we share a language.
But trying to pick up a SOEE with one hand from a near prone position is awkward at best, and nut-crushing at worst. I spared myself the nut crushing, but I still had that flash in my head:
Dude, why didn’t you just use Dictionary.com? I bet they have even more listings than the SOEE, anyway, and you don’t have to reach farther than the keyboard.
And it was true. In the age of the internet, having a SOEE is meaningless. Our world and language is changing so rapidly as technology advances. Far faster than crusty old dictionary publishers are willing to keep up with. While they still debate “Googling”, a hundred new words like “iPhone” have been on our lips. No book can ever keep up with that shit.
But the web can. Oh, boy, can it.
Why should my child ever learn to waste their time on books, when they can access anything they could possibly want to know or read or see or hear with their keyboard (if we even need keyboards by then)? Why waste space with books when you could keep something useful on the shelves instead? Like, I don’t know, your cyborg dog or some shit.
Who is going to instill in them the proper reverence and respect for books, when I, their 33 year old father and a book lover in my own right, can see and concede that even now, in 2007, the computer can do almost anything a book can do, better and cheaper. Once they invent a computer light enough to hold in one hand on the subway (and that day is not far off), it will be full on EVERYTHING.
When vast libraries of novels and comics and art are available on the web, will I even KEEP my books? Will I sell them while they still have slightly more value than the paper they are printed on, toss them on the sidewalk? Put them in dusty boxes for my kids to mock nostalgically after I am dead, while my grandkids look at them like I might a telegraph machine?
Ugh. It’s so sad. I want to hug all my books and promise to never forsake them.
But I probably will.