This was forwarded by S.P. Klein:


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/books/review/letters-inside-a-pearl-and-more.html?_r=0 



SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
Letters: ‘Inside a Pearl,’ and More


What Would Nabokov Do?

To the Editor:

I am responding to the discussion of the e-book reading experience in 
the Bookends column (Jan. 5), and the subsequent letters page (Jan. 26). 
I was a student of Vladimir Nabokov’s in his last year of teaching 
literature to Cornell undergraduates, when the American publication of 
“Lolita” allowed him to leave us to lesser lecturers and devote himself 
to his butterflies and books. As he wrote, sorting sentences and dealing 
with their details, Nabokov arranged them flexibly over index cards. How 
he would have loved and applauded word processors.

He always read with a dictionary at hand, and advised us all to do so. 
He would have embraced an e-reader that would allow a word to reveal its 
meaning at the touch of a finger.

Surely, the “sight, smell and touch” of paper is not central to the flow 
of ideas and images from book to brain. From his grave, V.N. must be 
shouting: “Up with e-readers and word processors. Down with biases based 
only upon previously programmed behavior.” What, he might have asked, 
would those who denigrate electronic devices have said when the world 
went from stone tablets to scrolls?

NAN PRENER
GRAHAMSVILLE, N.Y.

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