The brother of a dear college friend, Matt Smith, is the Super-Uber-Cataloguer of the Persian Collection at Harvard’s Widener Library. (That’s not his real title.) His recent post on a northeastern private school turning their library collection entirely into Kindles has been kicking around in my head enough for me to finally write about it. This does seem to be the litmus test for worthy posts– whether it survives the mental onslaught of the morning pre-coffee drive to school several days in a row.

Matt’s opinion on the classic “NPR” argument that we all love the way books smell too much to let them die is that this rhetoric is not terribly informed and slightly kinky. It makes me giggle, but it also makes me think that there is a parallel argument to be had about the sensory gratification of technology. My own argument for a long time has been that “literacy tech” dangerously cuts our senses down to two out of five. But I find myself re-evaluating that when I think of a bevy of teens touch-padding their way through Sense and Sensibility on a Kindle, or how my own less privileged ADHD boys beg for laptop work.

I think there’s possibly two factors at play here. One, I wonder if the state of learning via multiple modes of input is still so infantile in our schools that computers actually represent a step UP on the sensory scale.

And two, I wonder if working on a computer is somehow more sensorily captivating than I have been giving it credit for. I’d love to see some studies on this; I don’t know of any. I have tons of questions about it.

Where does that sense of “disappearing”– of time evaporating– on a computer come from?

Is it the same as when you dissolve into a good book, or into a hobby you love– “being in flow”?

Does the limitation of one’s senses on a computer paradoxically help one concentrate on computer-based tasks more, like a person struck with hearing loss compensates with heightened sight and smell?

And what does this all mean in the context of reading and comprehending text?

But all this is not actually the main thrust of Matt’s post. His major concern is that switching a library entirely over to Kindles will necessarily limit the amount of books available to library patrons, restricting them to those relatively few texts that are available through one for-profit corporation.

I suppose my concern is related, but not similar. I mean, eventually, if we decide that Kindles will supplant books the way we decided that books would supplant hand-lettered scrolls, then I’m pretty sure that eventually all 300,000 titles in the world will be on Kindles– and it won’t be any different than selected books being produced by publishing companies.

There’s only one world-shaking difference between this switch and others in the past: the dependence on electric power.

Never before has the physical existence of a text depended entirely on whether you have the capacity to charge your battery. And for me, just like our food, every step that makes the production of a book dependent on something else is one step away from safe– safe from censors, from governments, from book-burners, from dictators.

It’s also why I insist that kids memorize at least The First Amendment and a poem of choice before they leave my classroom. For books, too, despite the safety of their physical presence, can also be destroyed permanently– as well as the knowledge within them. We all know what happened in Alexandria.

But no matter where my kids are in twenty years– in jail, in an abusive relationship, on a hurricane-stricken coast, in a country with no civil rights– no matter what places they find themselves in which others are bent on seeking the destruction of their freedom (and begin by turning off the power)– no matter what, my students will, in all hope, have some piece of inspiration from literature in their minds, glowing like a candle in the dark.

Kindling them, in fact. And isn’t that ironic.