From Inquiry to Academic Writing A Practical Guide, 3rd edition

70 CHAPTER 3 | FRom IdEnTIFyIng ClAIms To AnAlyzIng ARgumEnTs

word, for those who are the most vulnerable victims of the illit-

eracy threat, the $359 Kindle offers little in the way of hope.

One book for a poor person is all he or she needs to be inspired

and change the world; with the Kindle, that one book is consoli-

dated and digitized, transformed from a tangible piece of hope

and the future into a mere collection of words in the theoreti-

cally infinite dimension of cyberspace. A “book” on the Kindle is

a book wedged among many other books, separated by nothing

more than title, devoid of essence, devoid of uniqueness, devoid

of personality, devoid of its unique position in space — precisely

what makes a book a “book,” as opposed to a mere collection

of words. It is no longer singular, no longer serendipitous, no

longer distinguishable.

The e-book cannot, like a bound book, pass through

multiple hands and eventually settle itself on the right person,

ready to be unleashed as a tool to change the world. Due to the

restrictions on sharing and reselling e-books with the Kindle,

the very nature of reading books transforms from highly com-

munal to individualistic, from highly active to somewhat passive.

The Kindle will lead to the mystification of books, wherein they

become less unique capsules of thoughts and ideas and experi-

ences and more utility-oriented modes of information-giving.

What many Kindle advocates fail to realize is that oftentimes,

the transformative quality of books resides less in the actual

words comprising the book and more in the actual experience of

reading.

There is also something to be said for the utter cor-

poreality of books that lies at the heart of Leibniz’s metaphor.

Libraries are physical testaments to all that we have learned

and recorded during human history. The sheer size of librar-

ies, the sheer number of volumes residing in them, tell us,

in a spatial sense, of all the theoretical knowledge we have

accumulated in the course of our existence, and all the power

we have to further shape and define the world we live in. The

Kindle and other digital literary technologies are threatening

the very connection between the world of ideas and the mate-

rial world, threatening to take our literal measures of progress

and hide them away in the vast database of words and ideas,

Camp 3

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books inspire people to

create change in the

world.

An evaluative claim

in which the author

observes that technol-

ogy can make reading

passive. Then a claim of

fact: that the experience

of reading can be trans-

formative.

The student offers a final

evaluative claim, observ-

ing that the Kindle

threatens to mask the

relationship between

ideas and the world.

03_GRE_5344_Ch3_055_079.indd 70 11/19/14 11:06 AM