A Baby Owl we can watch from our yard.

E-Books, the faint click of a changing screen.

I have heard a lot of comments about e-reading. Many comments remind me of myself, back in the late 70s when I said, “No one is going to pay to have a cable run out and hooked up to their television sets.” People before me claimed, “Television would never catch on.”

I bought my first computer in the early eighties, a Commodore Vic 20. I had to type in the programs from a magazine line by line. Any miss placed comma resulted in a program coma and it was stored on little cassette tapes. Next, a Commodore 64, then a PC 286, 486 and every computer became a little faster and more self sufficient. I’ve had A Drives, Floppy Drives, Zip Drives, drivers too. I wondered if a home computer would ever catch on.

I had a cell phone back in the late 90s and early 00s when people around me still scoffed at the idea of being contacted after leaving the home or office. I tried to explain about the off button.

I am using a smart phone at the moment and it does more in three ounces than the Vic 20 or even the 486 did on their best days. I can play games, read email, send text messages, buy things, record ideas, keep a shopping list, get reminders of birthdays and appointments, watch television, go to youtube, listen to music, take pictures, edit the pictures, email the pictures, I can read and create documents, edit documents, I read the Wall Street Journal and our local newspaper and have a complete library of classic literature that I can read anywhere. Did I mention I can make and receive phone calls?

I have been wanting an e-book reader, the prices are still beyond my income to outgo ratio. At the moment, I read books on my phone. The phone is much easier to manage in bed than a paper book that sometimes slips and leaves little dents in my forehead. It is convenient, I can take the three ounce phone just about anywhere, I haven’t done any diving in water or sky with it, and don’t plan to try. The books fit on a tiny memory card smaller than my fingernail. I can enlarge the print, auto-scroll and it remembers where I left off.

I was wondering through the Wall Street Journal when I found an article about Google getting into the E-book business. In the comments section as I expected were the folks who would have helped me with the tin foil on my rabbit ears lamenting that subscription T. V. would never find a market. Many of them can be spotted close up by the little dents in their foreheads from the corners of the real-made-of-paper-books from the real-brick-and-mortar-bookstores.

From what I gather, Google will keep the ‘copy’ online and you can access it anytime you want. I’m okay with this, I use their document reader when I look at email attachments and read my local newspaper from their site. I can do this on both computers and my cell phone. It certainly is within my budget and I already have the ‘e’ habit.

I think the e-book market will keep catching on, the die-hard-rabbit-ear-holders will reluctantly nod at their cable boxes and sigh.

What? Do I hear the faint click of you leaving my page?