The Written Word

Gentle readers, something that your MatchGirl has a lot of is books.

And I love to have a lot of books. Art theory books from undergrad, loads of favorite dog-eared novels, cookbooks with gorgeous pictures and cookbooks with no pictures at all.




I love to go to my bookshelves and refer back to passages in novels. I love to go to my bookshelves and pull down a cookbook and get lost in the pages, searching for inspiration. I love to go back to my college texts and re-read something on Dada.

Boyfriend is not really sure that I need to display all these books, when we move to our new (yet to be found) place. He's wrong.

I have been thinking a lot about books lately. I am lucky enough to be part of the street team for Seth Godin's amazing new Domino Project, which is powered by Amazon and has an eye towards, in the long run, producing books, for the most part, on the Kindle.

When I was packing up my cds last weekend (yes, your MatchGirl still has cds) I was thinking about how long it had been since I had actually bought a cd. For the past 5 years or so, I have bought my music pretty much exclusively on mp3. And I remember, when iPods first came out, thinking I wouldn't get that into it. I loved the art of the cd packaging, I loved pulling out the liner notes, reading the lyrics or the ramblings or thank yous from the band. But, at the end of the day, the mp3 format, on a daily basis, is so very much more convenient than the actually cds. I can carry hundreds of thousands of songs with me on my morning commute or walking around the neighborhood. I don't need to think ahead to what I might want to listen to while on the plane or a road trip.

So, while most of my books are making the move with us (and the cds that I haven't had time to digitize), I wonder if when we move again I will be having the same thoughts about the printed word that I have about cds.