ebooks? eskeptical

you might know by now that i love books.  i teach english, i'm into poetry and ideas, yadda yadda, i love books.  but i also love books as physical objects.  please don't misunderstand me: i'm not one of those sicko aesthetes who selects reads based on their shelf-ability and barely opens the pages so as not to crease the binding.  no, sir, i'm not shy about ripping open each page, as wide as it will go, or taking a pencil to the page and stamping it with my own graffiti, exploring it with a little graphite, making it ugly with ownership.

i love the smell of books, too--old ones especially, and the stories they tell of where they've been.  the old ones smell musty, sometimes of smoke, of cherry, the new ones of clean possiblity.  i love the inky residue left after a long day, like a book is my own version of a coal mine. i also love the papery thinness of a page from a book, even though sylvia plath wrote about taking "a pill to kill / The thin papery feeling" (in "Cut"--a marvelous close study of a poem). 

i have a huge pile of new books--i have essays, i have poetry, i have freud, i have foucault, but last night i found that i have no unread novels.  i found instead this.  it took me a while to make a selection: Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover.  after my new ebook finished downloading, i just stared at it for a few seconds.  then i scrolled down and up. i  checked out the number of pages, read the first sentence a couple of times, then looked at the cover again.  this is a process not unlike the one i use for "real" books, but it halted after this tentative perusing. it was late, time for bed, and a harrowing new venture like reading a big book on a computer screen was just too much.  will it hurt my eyes?  will it betray my more corporeal friends?  will it make me a skimmer?  i do not approve of skimming.

and my biggest fear persists: how do you make an ebook ugly with ownership?

there are ways, i know.  i'm not exactly a luddite so much as a procrastinator; saying i'm "on the fence" about technology's role in reading is almost like saying i still don't know about this VCR thing.  so fine: i promise to give ereading a try.  tomorrow.