There is no shame in owning a Kindle. Literally. Ink-and-paper books can be embarrassing. No one wants to be caught red-handed with The Debutante Divorcée. To get away with reading Gadamer in public would require dressing up like a college professor. And no one, not even a college professor, has enough credibility to read Finnegan’s Wake in broad daylight.

For $259, readers can finally have a little privacy. Books are delivered wirelessly, eliminating clerks from the equation—the Kindle Store will not roll its eyes at you for buying a lowbrow bestseller. And Kindle’s unchanging exterior won’t betray your reading material to the rest of the coffee shop. No wonder Harlequin romances are big sellers.

Kindle is the same size as a book, pages are the same gray as paper, and, for the limited number of titles available in digital format, a Kindle book is cheaper than a paperback. These are welcome developments. But when the old-fashioned codex goes, venerable reading traditions will go with it. What will be lost if readers make the switch to e-books?

Bookshelves are clearly out. Frankly, their demise should be a relief – they were always a poser’s medium. Bookish types like to scrutinize the shelves when they’re in someone’s home for the first time, but the smart ones know not to trust their impressions; it’s easier to buy a book than to read one. Often, the most impressive books on a man’s shelves are the ones he only pretended to read in college. And women, stand warned: not every man who displays Jane Austen is as sensitive as he would like you to infer. There’s nothing wrong with signaling, and certainly nothing wrong with men who will admit to reading Austen, but Kindle forces people to signal which books they’ve read the same way they broadcast movies they’ve seen—by talking intelligently about them. Surely this is an improvement on the old system.

Marginalia is another of the digital revolution’s overrated casualties. Writing in the margins of a Kindle book is technically possible but inconvenient: the QWERTY keyboard is tiny, and it is difficult to insert punctuation. Then again, are notes that look like text messages really worse than most handwritten notes? Wasn’t it always a lot of “Yes, very true” and “What nonsense”? Most marginalia sounds so insipid upon rereading that annotated books are often too embarrassing to lend.

Not that anyone will loan should e-books take over, which is one tradition that it will be sad to see Kindle kill. Lending your friend a book is a gift. Telling him he ought to get himself a copy is a task. Buying him a copy for his Kindle is even worse, an imposition that forces him to read the book or feel like he’s wasted your money. For serious occasions, the kind that call for a long and heartfelt inscription inside the front cover, books will still be around. But casual, spur-of-the-moment, I-happen-to-have-it-in-my-purse-right-now lending will be out.

Kindle lacks the heft of a book—at pencil-width, the device is almost flimsy —and, unless scratch-and-sniff technology improves, it will continue to lack the smell of musty old pages. Nor is it a patch on the old-fashioned broadsheet when it comes to the morning newspaper: it’s hard to imagine being informed about a headless body in a topless bar in 12-point type. But aside from these sentimental attachments, Kindle is a perfectly adequate substitute for paper. It does not have the eyeball-frying glare of a computer screen, nor does it require nearly as much set-up as most digital toys.

It will not force any revolutionary changes in the way people read; this is not the iPod of publishing. MP3 players were revolutionary. They killed the album, which is quite a scalp for a little plastic device to collect. No longer must songwriters churn out the 40 minutes of filler that come after a single. There are trade-offs to this transition—the hidden track, the concept album, Storm Thorgerson cover art—but there will be no turning back. Kindle isn’t analogous to the shift from albums to single songs because, though readers’ attention spans have dwindled since any golden decade you want to name, that hasn’t made books bite-sized, just bubblegum-flavored. And it’s hard to imagine how Kindle could make that problem better or worse.

So Kindle is a not a disaster, either for Western civilization or for one’s own reading life. Neither is it an absolute boon. The ability to carry 1,500 books in a purse is impressive, but that won’t make people read faster or better. The complete works of James Joyce can be downloaded for just $9.99, but the truth is, if you were going to read Finnegan’s Wake, you would have done it already.

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