I can’t really counter all the claims made about the Kindle by the true believers. It really is handy. It can hold ten million books and fifty million magazines (I think). It is portable and very easy to use. So convenient. Yes, yes, yes, yes, everything they say about the Kindle is true and great. I think there is even a religious movement dedicated to the Kindle. However, what the Kindle cannot do, and why I will never own one even if it allows me to hold all the books of the Library of Congress in my pocket for the cost of a penny is that it doesn’t allow for discovery…for an epiphany. For the first time in a very long time I was absolutely seduced by a book I hadn’t heard anything about until I happened to be walking by the store on a rainy evening. Being able to go into the Harvard Book Store and touch the book, browse its pages,as well as become engrossed in its words will never happen with a Kindle. A Kindle is a storage device. Usually when I go into bookstore I am just looking around. I don’t really care if I find something or not but I am always of a mind to get something if I can. Last night, a book caught me off guard and believe me when I tell you that I wasn’t in the “spending $28 on a 100 page hardcover” mood. Once I got the book in my hand, however, I just had to. Everyone I have shown the book to in the last 12-15 hours has also been completely in its thrall. So there, after all my public denunciations of the Kindle, my final rejection of it comes from an anecdote not a point by point dismantling. The Kindle will never give me an spot in time, that fleeting moment when everything else is shut out around you…it just isn’t capable of that in the way that an unknown book by an unknown author about a subject I , myself, didn’t know I was so interested in, on the shelf of the local bookstore I love did. Perhaps that isn’t the Kindle’s mission but if not, that’s sad since that is ultimately the whole point of a discovering a book you didn’t know you’d love - lighting the fire of an idea in your mind while wandering the streets in search of a beer.