Words without walls.

• Position: UPFRONT

It seems like a cool gadget, this newest version of Amazon's Kindle, and my wife, for whose birthday I bought it, seems to like it a lot. As the ads state, the wireless reader is smaller, lighter, faster than its predecessors. It can store up to 3,500 books and, the model I bought, comes with free 3G service, which lets her download whatever she wants whenever she wants it wherever that might be.

So why do I feel as if I've done something wrong, that I'm some sort of traitor? I suspect it's my memories of May Memorial, the library in Burlington, where I grew up. I owe it, and places like it, a debt I can never repay.

It was named for the wife of a local mill lord who had died on a trip abroad in 1935. Three years later, he and his sons donated $15,000 to help buy the old post office and convert it into a municipal library. Built 20 years earlier, this was a grand structure and, to the naive eyes of a kid in the 1950s and '60s, resembled nothing so much as a mini-Monticello, minus the dome. The interior was just as wonderful, with wainscoted walls and Oriental--or so I seem to recall--carpets. Under the gaze of Mrs. May, peering down from an oil portrait, one could daydream away a summer's afternoon in air-conditioned bliss, sunk deep into a leather armchair, shrouded in shush-enforced silence shattered only by the grandfather clock's hourly chime.

Comfy as these confines were, especially for a boy who shared a bedroom with two brothers in a crowded...