Kindle Sight

Yet another pretentious (sorry! I vowed to avoid name-calling) article about whether reading a book on the Kindle (it used to be reading a book on tape or CD) is really reading. Typical of the genre is this:

Ellen Feldman, who writes literary fiction, worries about what will happen to the ineffable kinship among book lovers if the Kindle becomes ubiquitous. She was having lunch in an Upper East Side restaurant when she saw the man at the next table reading “The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.”

“I started speculating about him,” said Ms. Feldman, whose novels include “Scottsboro” and “The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank.” “I had all these fantasies going — I was trying to think if there was a college nearby and if maybe he was a professor.”

Could it be that he was trying to impress someone? Was he whistling "The Yellow Rose Of Texas" as he read? Meanwhile, how about the ineffable joy that those with failing eyesight will experience when they realize that the Kindle, with its adjustable font sizes, makes every one of the quarter million titles available on Amazon for the device a large-print book? Try telling a nursing home resident who can now enjoy what was once denied to her that it isn't really reading.