Subway Scenes: Kindled Spirits?

While riding home on the subway this evening I saw two people each reading a Kindle. That's the first time I've seen more than on on the same subway car. So the Amazon.com reading device is becoming more common. I can only see having it if I were going on a long trip and didn't want to carry around a bunch of heavy books. This led me to wonder if someday books would become like vinyl LPs are now, collectors' items only conneisseurs would care about or care to own. Would you only be able to buy them online or in little, out of the way, used bookstores in quaint little villages? Would Harry Potter paperbacks go for $50? It could happen. CD stores are folding because of I Tunes. No more Virgin Records.

But then you wouldn't have the physical book to put on your bookcase and refer back to. You'd probably download it to your Kindle and then erase it once you read it so as not to clutter up the hard drive. If you wanted to read it again, you'd have to pay that $10 again, so keeping the book would be less likely.

This would add to the impermenance of our society. Pictures are no longer printed, they're digitized and stored in your laptop. (I even have fallen victim to this trend, I'm so lazy I haven't bothered to have any pictures printed since my trip to Louisville in April, they're all posted on Facebook, so why bother?) There's less and less of your life you can actually hold in your hands. It's all in the cyber-air.

Will ideas and conversation become as fleeting and transitory? Well, maybe I'm worried over nothing. When television came in, they said it would be the death of the movies. But the art of cinema remains vibrant.

What will life be like in 20 years? Will everyone have a Kindle? Will it become mandatory for school and college? No more heavy book bags to tote around.

As the two men were reading their Kindles across from each other on the subway, I read my edition of Wednesday Comics I had just bought at Midtown Comics. The Superman art by Lee Bermejo is dark and beautiful with incredible details in the folds of the costumes and the creases of the wrinkles of the superheroes' faces. One panel is particularly gorgeous with Superman and Batman's capes flapping in the wind as they discuss Superman's alienation atop a skyscraper in a noir-ish Gotham City. Batman is in both his own strip and Superman's this week.

I wonder what the two guys were reading.