The advent of Napster, MP3 and other Internet tune-snatching programs has forced me to discard my CDs. Victims of the unstoppable juggernaut called technology. My once beloved disks can now be found atop a scrap heap of formerly irreplaceable items. Just look up there and you can see them right above the VHS cassettes, LP's, floppy disks, and Polaroids. If you keep digging through the pile, you can probably find my old Atari games and a Commodore computer if you are lucky. I suppose technology's Darwinian treatment of my previously most prized possessions is to be expected. Progress has its victims, Nevertheless, I tell you here and now, "The book stops here."

You heard me, even despite the pun. My library will not end up in a heap alongside my 8-track tapes. The purveyors of technology are pushing to introduce the virtual book, and they must be stopped. There are wondrous qualities inherent in both books and personal libraries that cannot be replicated by bits, bytes and handheld devices. Qualities which often remain unnoticed until you stop and consider life without them.

For example, Stephen King has started downloading his stories to online subscribers who pay per chapter or per story. His fans can then read his work on their monitors at home, or print the pages for a late night scare at bedtime. Unfortunately, both of these methods eliminate the need for cover art. Most people do not consider that the first page of any book is actually the cover. The colors, fonts, pictures and even the texture of the jacket helps set the mood for the book itself. Stephen King novels predominantly come in red and black jackets to start the frightening process while still on the nightstand, thus eliminating the cover is diminishing the book itself.

Furthermore, just as the elimination of the LP by the CD caused album cover art to virtually disappear, book cover art and photography will cease to exist. Remember the cover Andy Warhol designed for the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers album? Did you ever wonder why they just don't make covers like that anymore? Well, it's obnoxious! It's because those CD cases are way too small for anybody to care about the art on the front. Books on handheld devices will eliminate this valuable form of art entirely.

Personal libraries would also become extinct if we proceed down this path. Instead of a shelf full of ideas which go with any decor in any room of the house, we will have a hard drive full of ideas which are invisible to the naked eye. No longer will we be able to judge our hosts at a dinner party by perusing their bookshelves. No longer will we be able to snidely look down on our relatives for displaying all those Sidney Sheldon and Jackie Collins novels in public (while guiltily hiding our own copies). And think about the poor professors in this world whose offices are made intimidating purely through the use of literacy tomes which they assign to freshmen, but never read themselves. What would they do?

Finally, it should be made a crime to delete "Call me Ishmael." Not that anybody will ever have the necessary computer memory to download Moby Dick.

Just as the automobile replaced the horse and carriage the Internet will eventually replace the book. I'm just looking forward to the day when I meet some poor guy whose hard drive crashed just before he downloaded the final page of his novel. I'll scream to him, "Don't get a horse, get a book!"