Can Harper Lee connect the dots–and see what e-books would have meant to her younger self?

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By David Rothman

John Updike’s rant against e-books has made the New York Times in printed form. Another literary star, meanwhile, Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, also is looking askance at technology even if she does not discuss e-books directly. An Associated Press story from Monroeville, Alabama, reports:

She…writes about the scarcity of books in the 1930s in Monroeville, where she grew up and where she lives part of each year. That deficit, combined with a lack of anything else to do — no movies for kids, no parks for games — made books especially treasured, she writes.

“Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books,” she writes.

I hope that Miss Lee someday can connect the dots and imagine what e-books and a TeleRead-style national digital library system would meant to her in the 1930s.

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