Like Gwenda, I’ll take the fingers-in-my-ears road when it comes to this Kindle business. But before I do, here are my personal contributions to the righteous indignation; I mean, sound arguments on behalf of paper:

1. I’ve spent the past dozen years of my freakin’ life and thousands of my freakin’ dollars building and maintaining my personal library. From the days of sneaking around with the flashlight and Madeleine after lights out, I knew I had to have books near me at all times. I have built back muscles thanks to hauling three books in my bag because I couldn’t bear to choose which one was coming with me for the 15 free minutes of reading I expected to get on a given day. Not electronic books — earthbound-bookly-spirits books. This wicked hot guy seduced me once with the idea of “Court Street 3000″: a domestic utopia located on Court Street in Brooklyn festooned with the 3000+ books our collected and conjoined libraries would comprise. (Holy alliteration, Batman!)

Yes, I know nobody’s forcing me to give up my books. But dang, does just the thought — the mere thought! — that this electronic doodad is somehow preferable in ANY universe to someone somewhere just gets my knickers in a wad. Ghah!!

My love of books-as-objects, paper, ink, wood, wool, cotton, snow, leaves, animals, trees, water and the world we live in is very deep and visceral, you understand. It’s not a fetish. Visceral. Hence this weirdly emotive response I’m having here.

Oh yeah, and I married that guy.

2. Do you ever… fondle books while you read? Like, jiggle the paper as you’re about to turn the page, bend back the spine a little but not too much, or crinkle the Brodart on your library book (or husband’s favorite Richard Burton biography) while you’re deep in ponder?

Well, I sure as hell do.

“Disappear in your hands,” my Aunt Alice.

3. Yes, EVDO is cool. And I’m all for instant gratification. I mean, it’s no accident that I live in New York. And I’ve done my one-day-shipping and same-day-delivery-in-Manhattan and running around the city because the latest McCaig / Vess / Cho / Jean / Pope / insert-obscure-occultist-here Book We Must Have Right Now is in or whatever.

But.

My attention span is not yet so short nor is my inner 3-year-old so in control that I must have the ability to manifest what I want in my hands this very instant. This could easily morph into a huge conversation about the fragmented hoo-ha of our digital age, but I won’t go there.

Sometimes it’s good to have to work a little. That’s all I’m sayin’.

4. And I know we’re at #4, but here’s my #1 reason why I could never use Kindle for any reason other than mere curiosity, and for any length of time longer than about 5 minutes: no ability to underline passages or make notes or yes, even talk to myself in the margins with my highlighting tool of choice, a hot pink Gelly Roll. Jeff Bezos and friends will never, ever make that happen.

Waid and I barely argued (you know, couple-style bickering) when we were together. Like, ever. The only conversation I can think of where I even got close to getting really upset was this one time when we were talking about electronic paper. He’s going, “Hate to break it to you, dude, but it’s coming” and I’m going “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

He wasn’t being mean. I just get really visceral about my books.

Sorry to be such a crankypants about this, everybody. I’m done.