Join us in the future

It's time. I'm sorry, but it's just time.
Time for what?

Time for the future, that's what.

It's time to start using an electronic tablet, e-book or smartphone to do your reading. Whether it's a Kindle, Nook, Android or iPad, it's time to join us in the 21st century.

I hear the arguments right now: "But I love the feel of a book in my hand, or I love reading the paper on a Sunday afternoon. It's an intimate, tactile sensation that connects us with the words." Ya, ya ya and grandma loved eating pulled possum in shit sauce.

Are you afraid that no one will read anymore if they don't have big, cumbersome books or floppy, unwieldy newspapers? Well, let me tell you, they aren't reading now. The National Endowment for the Arts study Reading at Risk from 2004 found that fewer than half of American adults now read books. With a decline of 28 percent in the youngest age groups. I could quote a dozen other reports that say the same thing, but you get the idea.

Literacy is in danger, and one of the ways we can counteract that is to make reading special again. One of the ways that we can do that is through e-books and tablets. Much like the Internet changed the way we communicate with each other, tablets and reading apps such as kindle have the potential to change the way we read by allowing us unfettered access to books, newspapers, blogs and magazines.

Books, newspapers and magazines are wonderful things and they aren't going to go away. But they are changing to meet a new reality. Why carry around a huge book, when you can carry around one small portable device that does everything you need?

Seriously Martha, put down your knitting and push away the bowl of prunes. Don't be afeared of them new-fangled gadgets like the Intertubes and the Blueyrays. Embrace them and discover a world of thought and philosophy. A world where information is always with you. A world where you favorite stories come to life anew.

Many tablets and e-book readers are designed to make reading easier and more intuitive than ever. The e-paper of a Kindle is so close to a printed page as to be indistinguishable. Except for the fact that it can hold 3,500 volumes, change the text size so that even if your eyesight is failing you can still read with ease. And let's not forget the Kindle's text-to-speech abilities that can read a book to you. Seems like a godsend for a blind person to have complete access to a library anytime and anywhere they choose.

Heck, the iPad even lets you flip the pages, like a regular book, for those who just can't let go.

What? Now you want to tell me you don't want to buy something and then have it replaced by another gadget in a year. Alright, that's a possibility. I know soon we will all have the chips implanted in our heads so that we can download any information we want and live in our own virtual world, but until then this is the best we can do. Oh,how I long for the day when I can begin living as a firetruck in my own virtual world. Wait, what? Am I still typing? Damn.

Oh, yeah, here's one more selling point. Once the zombie apocalypse happens, it's not like you're going to be able to carry around a library. But you can make room for a tablet. You can carry more ammo toting a Kindle than a thesaurus.

I'll let the CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos say it best, "The most elegant feature of a physical book is that it disappears while you're reading. Immersed in the author's world and ideas, you don't notice a book's glue, the stitching, or ink. Our top design objective is to make Kindle disappear — just like a physical book — so you can get lost in your reading, not the technology."

Don't become a no-button wearing, horse and buggy driving anachronism like the Amish.

I have your silver unitard and go-go space boots right here waiting for you when you want to join us in Tomorrowland.

Those of us using tablets to read would just like to quote the great Charles Sheen when we think of you carrying around a thousand books, "They lay down with their ugly wives in front of their ugly children and just look at their loser lives, and then they look at me and they say 'I can't process it.'"