The era of the book is coming to an end.

So one would gather from reading (ha!) the latest column from Boulder, CO, writer Richard Cohen. [To read it for yourself, go to http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0808/cohen.php3]

Cohen, like a lot of us who like going to book stores and browsing (i.e. “not necessarily buying”), are finding fewer and fewer bookstores to go to and browse. They can’t possibly be going out of business because we weren’t buying anything—they are there, after all, for our pleasure and not for their own profit—so they must be going under because of some nefarious villain.

Let’s blame Jeffrey P. Bezos and the company he founded: Amazon.

See, you can tell that the era of the book is coming to a close because, every day, Amazon only sells about a gazillion books.

On top of that, Amazon is actively trying (according to Cohen) to get rid of the book by producing a product called the “Kindle”. For those of you who don’t know, Kindle is the latest generation of the e-reader. For those of you for whom that didn’t clear things up, an e-reader is something like a Palm Pilot except that the screen is bigger and it’s really only designed for reading text (as opposed to surfing the web or doing some actual computing [a thing people used to do on computers]). Objections to previous e-readers were that they didn’t hold enough text and they were hard to read. The Kindle, on the other hand, holds something like 200,000 books and is supposed to be easy to read—even in the sun (I don’t know, I don’t have one or know anyone who does [but if you do, make sure you go there and buy MY books—“First Time—The Legend of Garison Fitch”; “Second Time” and, never offered anywhere else before! “Psalm 88”]).

If Kindle takes off (and, right now, that $359 price tag is kind of a turn-off for many), will it really replace the book? Probably not in the foreseeable future.

But if it does, so what?

I like books. One might even say I LOVE books. I do like holding a real book in my hand, turning real pages in my hand, putting a real book under a table to level it, etc. But the best leather cover won’t make me stick with a lousy book. For all I like about the feel and experience of a “real” book, what sells me on a book is the text.

And that’s what’s going to keep the book alive—on paper or in an electronic form: good writing, entertaining stories, factual … facts. If there were a danger of men and women ceasing to write or people ceasing to read, then I would be in a swivet (a word I read in a book … then heard on “Green Acres”).

They’re not and I’m not, but if you’re really worried one way or another, a good place to start “doing something about it” would be to buy my books.

Comments or want to buy a book? Email me at martha917@yahoo.com