A card from Way Beyond...

Two years ago I was given an e-book reader. No, I did not fall in love with it at first sight, but it was nice. Stereotypes are not welcome on these pages, but I must admit I started asking all the usual questions about a non-paper format. I shall not list them, another unwelcome ill of our times. More than anything, I began to talk to people, as pioneers do...my relationship with paper had already taken a turn for the journey whence no one returns since the discovery of the Smartpen and sim-consec - you must ask me to talk about that some time. Paper is good, witness one very small part of my origami production.

I started questioning, I say. The dialogue was something like this:

Interlocutor: I could never live without paper books
Martin: Why?
I: Well, you can touch them
M: You can touch a Kindle...
I: Yes, but that is bad for your eyes
M: No, opticians have decreed there is a better resolution, no curvature...
I: Yes yes, but a real book is different, you can write notes on it
M: You can do the same with an e-reader
I: But what about the smell?

Well, this took me a moment. I felt I was floundering. Then one day, I found a solution! I went back to my man, but was not taken as seriously as I had honestly taken him.
Ok, I'll stop. But what he should have said is just "I like paper books", and that cannot and should not be argued with.

This is not about the superiority of the electronic versus the traditional. And I know there is a copyright issue after the owner's death as for music, but I do not want that card played here, or I shall play the Amazon one, and I mean the Forest with all the trees. And please back off if you are about to launch the cannonball of tradition, or I will hit you with my chemical warfare.

So what makes me so iconoclastic, and why did this find its way on an albeit skewed interpreting blog?

Well, here is the logic: an interpreter is itinerant, or at least does not usually work from home (yet); and books are portable if you are reading one or two novels on your flight (and you don't even need to switch them off on departure), but reference books - the ones we really need for our job - are less so; and they need to be bought, as you cannot normally borrow them from a library; and even if you do decide to carry them, they are clumsy to use, noisy in the booth, and incredibly slow to refer to (I calculate that the useful search time is one second - after that I will start to paraphrase). You see?

So what could I do with the inevitable bigger and better paper collection I already own? I cast my mind back to the first PC I got. There was nothing on it of course, and my life already too complex to re-format. Until I bought a scanner. And now I knew I had it! Unsolicited, though with their knowledge, I am devoting the present post to these guys:
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I will not introduce their products here, suffice it to say that if you wish your books will be returned to you without a scratch. But I have selected another option. There is not one where the book is actually returned to you in ash form in an urn, but I like the symbolic choice of having to break the book's backbone, suck out the marrow, and receive a pile of loose leaves, along with a whole host of (fully searchable) digital files. It is, I feel, a sublimation, an assumption into The Pantheon of Tomes, a rewarding and rightful de-materialized destiny.

And if I forget to charge my battery on the night, I can still just take to the conference the few pages of a glossary or topic compendium I need...
...to keep on keepin' on.