Mr. Kindle, come here, I need you

I got a Kindle for my birthday!

Karen said she wanted to give me one for Christmas, but they were out of stock. Just as well. By my birthday, Kindle 2 had been introduced, with some useful feature upgrades. Not that I could tell you what they were, or how to use them.

A "Kindle" is, of course, the book-reading hardware sold by Amazon.com. It is the debut of a new age in which paper, an excellent medium now in its second millennium of service, will be replaced by some new, flat, flexible, foldable medium on which words do not appear via impressions of ink but by the excitement of molecules. As nifty as it is to sit in the kitchen nook, command Kindle to download a book or newspaper, and receive that publication faster than you can pour a cup of coffee, I get the distinct impression that I am working with a primitive prototype.

The Kindle, to me, must be like the first telephones were to people in the 1890s living in the dawn of the telephonics age. It is a marvel unto itself, but only a starting point, the first planting of a new technology that will sprout unimaginable produce, the same way the astounding communications products of our age – including the Kindle – trace their roots back to the first primitive, prototypal, telephones.

I wonder, in the 1890s, when someone brought a telephone into our house for the first time, who I would have wanted to call first. Ceremonially, I set aside the startup instructions for the Kindle, took the Kindle off its charger, and tried to decide which writer I wanted to download first. I decided on E.B. White, the famed 20th-century essayist and author of "Charlotte's Web," and history's reigning expert on humor. "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can," White wrote, "but the thing dies in the process, and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." Those words have guided a multitude of careers.

But Amazon has yet to provide any E.B. White titles in its inventory of Kindle availability, a features shortcoming that I am sure will be upgraded any day now. And so I moved on to Eudora Welty. Here I did slightly better, finding and downloading an anthology of Southern writers that included Miss Welty. Then I hit a snag, that developers of this new print medium technology will need to fix, or risk driving all future readers to the loony bin. In a book, you can turn to a page. In Kindle, you can't. At least not that I have yet discovered. In the anthology, if they are collected alphabetically, as I suspect they are, since the first work is that of James Agee, then I will have put a lot of miles on the Next key, and my thumb joint, before I reach Welty.

As yet, I have chosen not to do that. Instead, this primitivity invites me to look backward and forward, as I do often when I try to picture the media of the future. Since it was my 66th (!) birthday, I looked backward to 1943 and wondered what sort of state-of-the-art communications technology I might have received as a birthday gift at that time. I happen to have in my possession a couple of Life magazines from the 1940s, one from '41 and one from '42. They were huge magazines, up-to-date but also impossibly quaint, and delivered by mailmen.

There is no way to fast-forward from a 1942 Life magazine to a Kindle. The only way we could have gotten here is one day at a time. Likewise, looking forward, we must get there one day at a time. On the way, I predict (as I predicted 10 years ago) newspapers and books will be printed on a wide sheet, folded in the middle, to create in essence four pages of print. We will start on Page One, turn to Page Two, then Three and the back page, Page Four. We will press some kind of trigger in the material, and the next four pages will load.

But 66 years from now, I predict the Kindle will have evolved into a tiny chip, embedded in our audio-video neural complex, eliminating all need for external hardware such as screens and speakers. Our volume and channel controls will be managed by our thoughts. We can watch or read or listen to the content of our choice, simply by bidding it to happen.