Some think the Kindle e-book signals the death of the book as we know it; that the cool thing is to have books downloaded onto hand held devices. But here's something quite different coming from a very 'in' magazine in Australia - the Vice Magazine. In the Student Guide is an article called Get Smart. I'm quoting from Read:
'Books are important...Penguin Classics are acceptable on the condition they are out of print. New copies are rather 'low rent' for the serious intellectual, because ideally you want to look like you grew up with such books strewn carelessly all over the house, and when you wish to bone up on Galbraith, you don't bother with a bookstore, you languidly fetch a copy from the family library.
For this reason, out of print, dog-eared Pelican books with the blue and white covers are highly desirable. Forget about bookmarks: you know the page you want because you've read it a dozen times already, remember?
And from Read Some More:
Good topics include design, psychology, (leftist) economics and philosophy. Anything that's likely to have a difficult to learn, semi-technical vocabulary attached to it that'll intimidate anyone who happens to peer over your shoulder on the bus. Schopenhauer, Marx, Freud, Derrida and Lacan all score well here. Thick books are awkward, cumbersome and ugly. Stick to thin books. Thick books are for people at airports. Thin books look austere and poetic.'
If you were to go to General Pants Co - an Aussi high street fashion clothing store you'd find, in accessories, not Kindles with downloads but a selection of orange and white Penguin books. They are called 'Popular Penguins' with a mixture of fiction and nonfiction. The range is broad, from Hardy, Austen and Wilde to Nick Hornby, Roald Dahl and Donna Tartt.
Does the thin, old, foxed Penguin really think he can engage in battle with the e book Goliath?
