Ray Bradbury Would Not Approve

Ray Bradbury, who famously wrote about the future, was a reluctant participant in it when it arrived. Even retroactively. He never learned to drive, despite becoming a resident of Los Angeles in 1934, and for most of his life he refused to fly. The onset of the personal computer held no appeal for him, and the many advantages of Word Processing was not able to seduce him away from his beloved typewriter. Despite the fact that he once predicted, and seemed to approve of, e-readers in a 1983 CBS News interview -- "We're going to need books to carry our libraries with us in our breast pocket. Nothing wrong with that, is there? It just doesn't look like a book." -- when they became a reality in his late years, he railed against them, and, for a time, refused to have his work digitized. For he was a passionate lover of The Book -- of its touch and feel, of the sound of its pages as they are being turned or flipped and of its scent, inky upon its birth; dusty in its old age. He just could not see the plastic and glass text delivery systems as Machineries of Joy