To e Or Not To e. That Is The Question.

As we continue to digitize ourselves, the book is being forced in for an upgrade. I feel surrounded by e-reader converts.

They gush like a Monday morning after a weekend hanging out with a new potential boyfriend. It’s just like reading a book! When I want to read something, I can download it instantly! Novels are cheaper! No more lugging books around! I don’t have to worry about space in my house! It’s so great when I travel!

Fine points. I’ll especially concede the last one. The wife and I have been on long trips together and I’ve filled a backpack with paperbacks, which turns into a pain pretty quick.

But at the risk of sounding like a cranky Luddite, I just can’t get bring myself to buy one. That has nothing to do with the technology. I am not the kind of guy who, if I’d been handed the first Roman scroll, would have thrown it to the ground. “Papryus? This doesn’t have the permanence of stone! Stupid!”

For me, reading a novel is about more than digesting content. Maybe you’re different. That’s fine. But here’s seven reasons I’m not buying an e-reader anytime soon.

• As much as I love iTunes — and I do — I miss the Tower Record stores of the world, where you could flip through an endless sea of CDs. There was something about the physicality of it that appealed to me. Still does. I do not need Barnes & Noble or The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square reduced to a kiosk.

• On average, I spend about ten hours a day in front of a computer. I do not need reading to feel like work.

• Some stories just flat out don’t work electronically. Take the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, meant to feel like the journal, filled with doodles, of a sixth grader. Or The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, with its footnotes and detailed illustrations that are key to the whole story. I just don’t think those kinds of books translate as well digitally.

• As someone who hopes one day that people will riot at bookstores for the honor of buying my novel in non-discounted, hardcover format, the tangibility of books makes people willing to pay for them. And I think they should. Stories are worth something. And dollar for dollar, I get more entertainment and meaning from a novel than just about anything else I divert myself with, including movies, baseball games, music, eating buffalo wings. You name it. But when you’re not buying a thing, and you’re buying a “file”, it messes with your head. And you think you should pay a lot less for it because the “physical production” piece is missing. I’ve been working on a novel on and off for eight years. I can tell you, most of the work doesn’t go into sending the file to the printer. But when people start to think that they should be able to buy books for five bucks, how many others will pursue writing as a career? Passion doesn’t put food on the table.

• I have no desire to line my bookshelves with memory-filled e-readers.

• Reading Where The Wild Things Are to Jack, his tiny face lit up by the glow from a device, feels really freaking wrong to me.

• Have you people not seen Terminator? You know what happens when the machines start thinking? They get rid of the people. What do you think will happen once we’ve finished uploading all the world’s literature onto farms of servers? Nothing good, I can assure you, people. Nothing good.