Books Disappear: When 4G Kindle Gave Up

As I came downstairs for breakfast, I heard my wife, already at the table, laughing.

“What’s this all about?” I asked.

“Some important official in India has had an entire reservoir drained there.”

She was looking at her cellphone.

“Why was that?”

“He’d lost his cellphone.”

“Did they find it?”

“Yes.”

I thought about it. No official in America could get away with that. Elsewhere though? Could happen.

After breakfast, she went out to her car to go off to Southampton. I’d walked her to the door. And coming back into the kitchen, I saw her cellphone. I grabbed it and raced back out, but it was too late.

I better call her and tell her it’s here, I thought.

Which is about as far as I intend to go with this conversation.

I’m sure we all agree. There are five important body parts we must be sure to take with us everywhere: two legs, two arms and the cellphone.

Anyway, what I really want to write about here is how my entire library of 475 books except for one simply vanished. It was about a year ago.

Over the years editing Dan’s Papers, authors have sent me their books, hoping I might review them for the paper. There were so many that I built a library in which to house this collection. This is not what I lost last year, but I wanted to mention it.

The library from which all but one of 475 books vanished was my online library. For 11 years now, I’ve been downloading certain books on Kindle. I read in bed late at night sometimes and I thought this would be better appreciated by my wife, from the keep-her-up-late-night-light perspective.

Anyway, last year, a message from Amazon appeared on my Kindle. Amazon owns Kindle. It said that this early version of that product, my Kindle, would no longer be able to download books after August 17, 2022. This earlier version worked with 4G. But now the world was using 5G. And they had not planned on that. I could get a new Kindle for 5G. They aren’t expensive. You can get one for about $65. But I would no longer be able to transfer the 475 books from my old 4G Kindle account to the new Kindle.

I spoke to them about it. My Kindle account was on an email account that had ceased to exist. So my account could not be accessed anymore.

“You can always power up your old Kindle and read them there,” I was told.

In other words, I could slide my old Kindle, masquerading as a single book, into my real book library and I would be able to read all 475 downloaded books on it for as long as that old Kindle continued to work.

This has made me think about my music collection. I used to buy vinyl albums and play the songs on my record player. Today, the songs are all online. And my collection, begun in 2012, has 2,350 songs. I had paid Apple to get these songs. So I own these files. Yes? But if the Russians disable America’s wi-fi, well, bye-bye songs.

Did I tell you I have more than 4,000 pictures on my phone?

In many ways, I am treading very heavily on this earth. However, in other ways I’m living very lightly. And you too.