THE PRINTED WORD

Never in the history of the planet has there been such an abundance of information and news available to so many mortals. And the technologies of information delivery just won't stop evolving, I guess, until the digital Singularity imagined by inventor and author Ray Kurzweil finally arrives.

In just my own case as a professional communicator, I have arranged for news to flow through my Blackberry, my personal laptop at home, my company PC at work, and now through my new Kindle. I have access to the entire New York Times, for example, through all four electronic portals - plus the Gray Lady arrives in print form on my driveway with a plop just before dawn, wearing a demure blue plastic wrapper.

So why bother receiving the printed word at all? Perhaps it's my own gray beard, but there is still nothing so soothing as being able to unfold and lay out the daily news next to a cup of coffee at your favorite pit stop (mine is Peet's Coffee in the Larchmont neighborhood of Los Angeles, within sight of the Hollywood sign).

The same goes for books - printed books. I recently discovered LibraryThing in the digital "cloud" and scanned into the LibraryThing remote servers the titles and ISBN codes for my entire library of printed volumes. I was pleased to see that I now own more than one thousand books - as proud and arrogant as a sunburned Midwestern farmer when he has securely put the legendary one thousand acres of fertile land under deed and under the plow.

But the digital shift away from print is there and undeniable. Delighted by the movie Elegy, starring Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz, I went in search of the source book, the novel The Dying Animal by Philip Roth. Quickest way to obtain it? Download on my Kindle for less than $10. And I actually read it on the device, start to finish.

It was fine to plunge along with button-clicks, page following page, but I still hunger for my ink on paper. For us, in the transitional generation that came to adulthood before the turn of the century (I love being able to use the century mark as an excuse for almost everything), I guess we will have to make room for both - book-cases and book-links in uneasy alliance in our sentient lives.

Even my local bookshop has opened the door, just a tiny crack, to the digital age. Chevalier's Books, seventy years young and a beautiful shop just a door or two north of Peet's in Larchmont, has introduced it's first webpage. Well, it's actually a blogsite - a tentative toe poked into the digital stream.

Chevalier's is ten minutes away from the main gate of the Paramount Pictures lot and services a luminous local mix of the digerati and literati who create American film and television - but it is still much too traditional to sell you its books on-line. However, you can now "virtually visit" this elegant bookshop to see what's on offer in printed form on the shelves this week and, best of all, check up on the calendar revealing which of your favorite authors is due for a signing.

Print on paper has been a reliable portal to virtual worlds with character and passion that inform our own, more earth-bound reality. I can only hope that some of the comfortable traditions of that old world - daily news print, printed books, carefully brewed coffee - will hang in there just a bit longer in this new digital world of downloads, uploads, and tweets.