Books Sure Are Nice

I love how people are sure the book will survive because it’s a nice thing. Home cooked meals are nice also. It’s all my mother ever made. (Frozen dinners weren’t available when I was a child.) Those meals that moms made in the 1950s were better in every way than frozen dinners, and we all know it. It doesn’t stop people eating TV meals or even feeding them to their kids. Why? Because marketers have convinced us to opt for convenience over quality.
I’ll give you an example of how technology gets pushed onto us. When I was a club cyclist aged 17, my handmade bicycle was every bit as good as the bikes being ridden by Tour de France racers. It cost about one month of a tradesman’s wages. It was lightweight, durable, affordable, and was easy to fix. All racing cyclists in the 1960s had bikes that were similar. The frame was steel, the parts were Italian Campagnolo, the saddle made of British leather. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for a racer with a flat tire to exchange a wheel with a spectator on the road. As a consumer, this was great. I built my bike and was set for years. For the manufacturers, it wasn’t so good. After they’d sold me a track bike, road bike and training bike, I didn’t need anything else for the foreseeable future. This all changed after Greg LeMond bolted a pair of aero-bars to his bike in the 1989 Tour de France. Since then, technical innovations have transformed top-end racing bikes. They are lighter, but they are much more expensive. They are prone to breakage, difficult to fix, have a variety of components that aren’t interchangeable, require specialized tools for repair, and have a limited lifespan. Plenty of people like me remain devoted to the older equipment. We trade bits and pieces on eBay. The cycling press call us retrogrouches. Companies still make steel frames by hand, but it’s a boutique business and expensive. Amateur racing cyclists would be better off if things could be like they used to be, but commercial imperatives force change and innovation.
A good book? Nice as a home cooked meal.
The Kindle? Downloads faster than Lance!