In second grade, I would stop my mom from dog-earing the pages of the books we would read together before bed. If the cover of one of my paperbacks is accidentally folded or ripped, I’ll usually press it in between heavier books to make the cover flat again, or repair its pages with carefully attached strips of tape. My towering, unsteady bookshelves have taken up the majority of my bedroom since I began to read. My seven Harry Potter books are tea-stained and worn but, because of my obsession with taking care of them, are still held together after the countless times I have flipped their pages. I respect books, and I love them. In 2007 when Amazon’s first Kindle was introduced, my friends began asking for them for Christmas while I looked on condescendingly. A Kindle seemed less like an exciting new device that would allow more people to have access to books on-the-go, and more as if an uncontrollable revolution had begun in the literary world. It felt, dramatically, close to a nightmare to imagine a small white electronic device perched on a shelf otherwise empty, containing in it the sixty books that I thought should have been filling the shelves in paper form. My mind was set completely against the Kindle.

I continued stubbornly with this mindset for two more years, lugging giant hardcover books to school so I could read them during free-reading time. Other seventh graders slipped their sleek, centimeter-thick kindles into the tiny front pocket of their backpacks, able to flip through countless options if they were bored of what they were reading at the time. I looked at them in a way a traditional, single-minded great-grandmother might– disapproving and unable to accept changing technologies. I later began walking to school, and then in high school I began taking the bus, and it became increasingly difficult to carry multiple books in my backpack along with what felt like 40 other pounds of textbooks and binders. When school and homework began to take up more time and I stopped going to the bookstore periodically almost every week, I stopped reading new books as much. Instead I would re-read old books I found around the house, still sure that giving in to the Kindle would be a small betrayal to the paper I had stuck by for so many years. All of a sudden, however, the small, positive pieces of information about the Kindle that had accumulated in the back of my mind came together, the most overpowering being the fact that I would likely read more if I got one. Getting books was cheaper, easier, and quicker on a Kindle than it was to buy all my books– especially if they were new and only sold in hardcover at the time. With a silent nod of respect to my beloved local bookstores and with promises that I would return, I bought a Kindle. I now balance my time switching on and off between paper and electronic books, able to read something I hear about immediately after downloading it in less than a minute.

I am a supporter of real, paper books– as I always have been– but more than this I am a supporter of reading, and the Kindle has ultimately allowed more people to have access to reading material. While it often sacrifices my beloved, perfectly-intact yellowing pages of words, more readers were created because of the Amazon Kindle. I am sacrificing my paper-book-snob reputation for the reputation of the device that turned many non-readers into readers.