All Eleven Different

At a book club meeting the other night (Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending) there were eleven of us.  When someone started reading a paragraph from page 42 the others scrambled to find it.  “For me it’s on page 5,438” said my neighbor, holding up what I guess is known as an e-reader.

I looked around the circle -- saw a big old Kindle, a Nook, a new small Kindle, a laptop, what looked like an assortment of cell phones – and what struck me was that no two were alike.  Even the three who held old-fashioned books happened to be unique, one with a hard-cover edition, one paperback, one large print edition.

And I – yes, I contributed something different – as a last-minute guest who had read the book last year, I had no copy at all.