On Receiving a Kindle

Recently my brother and his wife gave my wife and me two Kindles, a white one for her and a black one for me. No, it was neither my wife's birthday nor mine, nor was it our anniversary, all of which are months away. There was absolutely no reason to give us these presents except as an expression of love. “Why wait to enjoy something?” my brother asked me, when I called to thank them for their gift. “Now’s the time!” He and his wife were pleased with their recently acquired Kindles and they assumed that we would feel the same way.

In fact the gifts couldn’t have arrived at a better time. The several cartons of books that were clearly marked as destined for our temporary quarters were mistakenly shipped into storage by the otherwise estimable moving company that transported our belonging. It was a complicated move involving six different destinations, so it's remarkable that they made only one mistake. Still, here we are without any of the books my wife had ordered for the various book clubs to which we belong. No problem! Now we can download them onto our Kindles. And as my brother pointed out, if we register both of them on the same account, each of us can download the other’s books without additional charge.

We were grateful to our beneficent siblings. Alas, they didn’t know what technological phobias lurk in their brother’s soul. It was not always that way. I spent my first graduate school summer calculating correlation coefficients for Professor Robert L. Thorndike. I used a huge Burroughs calculating machine in which you entered the paired values for A and B. The machine then gave you the components from which you could calculate the coefficient. You had to calculate each coefficient twice to make sure you hadn’t made an error in entering the values. As I recall, it took about a half hour to compute a coefficient with a sample of only 30 cases. Today, this looks as antiquated as washing clothes on a washboard, but at the time, it was considered the latest thing. (Raise your hand if you’ve ever seen a washboard.)

I was thrilled, a few years later, when the university made available to the graduate students an electronic computer. You entered the data on punched cards, one or more per case, submitted the stack of cards to the computer center, and picked up the results the next day. This was a big improvement, a great saving of time, and made it possible to process large batches of data. With the aid of punched cards, I analyzed the data for my doctoral dissertation. Punched cards! Again, this is ancient history but at the time the technology seemed miraculous, and I was proud to be using this innovation.

In the 1980s, my friend and colleague Dov Spolsky and I were the first in Jerusalem to purchase IBM personal computers. These were laughably weak compared to today’s personal computers but at the time they seemed as marvelous as punched cards did a generation before. In the terms employed by researchers of the spread of innovation, Dov and I were early adopters. As personal computers became ever more powerful and cheaper, I bought successively more sophisticated ones until finally I stopped. I found myself resisting innovations. I was late to adopt a router, for example, a device that permits my wife and me to access the internet at the same time, although the usefulness of a router was clear to me long before we adopted one.

I’ve gone from being an early adopter to a late adopter and am now on the road to becoming a non-adopter. So I look at my new Kindle with mixed emotions. I’m convinced I will like its convenience, but first I have to learn how to use it. I know this won’t be hard. After all, Amazon couldn’t have sold millions of the device if it were difficult to operate. I will eventually overcome my inertia, register the device, download the next book for my book club, and be enchanted with the result. But in the meantime, I have to struggle with the impulse to avoid yet another innovation, yet another complication to my life.

Yes, it’s old age that’s operating here, but it's not what you're thinking. I’m not so lost to senescence that I can’t learn something new (who is that snickering in the back row?). No, it’s not the inability to operate innovations that’s at work here. Rather it’s a desire to simplify my life. This desire is, I think, a concomitant of old age, although I may have reached this impulse earlier than most of my age mates. I’m no longer in the business of accumulation and acquisition. Instead I want to rid myself of inessential material goods and unnecessary complications. My new Kindle will be a convenience, but there’s no denying that it adds one more possession and one more complication to my life at a time when I’m doing my best to simplify it. Still, if you think I'll give it away or leave it unused on a shelf, you're wrong. I will use it with pleasure and gratitude. Tomorrow.