In my book, digital is a downer

Call me a Luddite, but I'll say it anyway: I'm terrified of Amazon's new electronic book reader, the Kindle.

This week the company that digitized the buying of books announced it is off to do the same to the reading of books. Enter the Kindle, a cream-colored device the size of a trade paperback that can download all 2,141 kilobytes of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in less than a minute — for a fee.

I took a short test drive with the Kindle yesterday. Amazon is definitely on to something. The thing is lighter and easier to handle than an actual book. Yet it reads like words on paper. There are no cables. No lights. No hum or beeping sounds that make you think you're on a computer.

Even after skimming just a few screens of Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns," which was pre-loaded on the device, I started to get that feeling that makes reading a book so powerful. "Going down the rabbit hole of absorption," Newsweek's Steven Levy called it. It's when a book teleports you into the ether, without you going anywhere.

Supposedly that magic couldn't be replicated with pixels on a screen. Too hollow, too distracting. Yet Amazon has done it. The Kindle feels like reading a book.

Said Steve Kessel, Amazon's V.P. of digital media: "Our entire design goal was when you pick this up and start reading, everything but the reading goes away."

Only it really doesn't. Behind the scenes, the Kindle is also a cellular phone. And that's what has me worried.

See, books are our last private refuge. They're analog. Stand-alone. Other than talking with my wife late at night, reading a book is about the last form of communication I do that doesn't involve logging on to some collective network.

It's just you and the author. Nobody else gets in the rabbit hole with you.

But what Amazon has made is the first wired book. The Kindle is a broadband wireless device. You can go on the Web with it. E-mail with it. Interact and share data with it.

And so the day is coming — is probably already here — when writers will be called on to meet with readers inside the book itself. Writing may become a continuous back-and-forth with readers. Because of the feedback power of networks, some say it's inevitable readers will join in the process of novel writing — by revising, correcting, hectoring. Everything will be a collaboration.

Big deal, you say. It's all interaction these days, Westneat.

Yes, I suppose it is. Constant feedback has taken over my industry. Some of it has been for the better, like when sharp-eyed readers point out errors.

But it's also made newspapers squeamish, a finger too often in the wind. Other times I read rant-filled comment threads on our Web site and I wonder: Why in the world are we publishing that?

And we are birdcage liner compared with the book. Do we really want crowds bulling their way into literature? You go to a fine restaurant, you don't want the other patrons to cook, do you?

Amazon, I love reading. I'll do it on paper. I'll do it in pixels. But please, keep it one thing I can still do alone.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.