During a Memorial Day weekend picnic, I had to break the bad news to a friend of ours. She works at a small bookstore.

I had to come clean about the new Kindle I had bought. We had brought it to the event because I had bought a few books for Bridget since she was fascinated by it. I wanted to tell our friend myself instead of having her see it by mistake.

I could tell by the look on her face that she did not like this development. After she heard the news, she set her jaw and looked squarely in my eyes.

“Brian, I want to punch you right now.”

Or something like that. She was kidding … kind of.  I like to think I support small local businesses, but she puts me to shame. The thing is, I don’t see owning an electronic book reader as a complete affront to local bookstores. Sure, some people can completely give up reading actual books, but I’m not one of those people. I wonder if bookstore advocates get that mad at people who get most of their books from the library.

After all, I had at least six books on my reading stack when I saw the really good discount available on the Kindle on a discount shopping site. I had resisted making the purchase for a long time, but couldn’t turn this price down.

After a few weeks with the device, however, I can see how people get hooked. First of all, it’s just easier to handle. You can easily read with one hand, leaving the other hand free to, I don’t know, hold a cold beer or warm cup of coffee while sitting on the porch on a breezy spring day. Not that I know that from experience or anything. Secondly, the convenience of surfing through the online shop and having a book appear on your device within a minute or so simply rules.

So I understand why people who don’t want to see bookstores continue to disappear hate these devices. The money comes out of an account, the book appears magically and no one has to bother to move except if they need to refill on their drink.

I know I will never get that bad. In fact, one of the books I recently finished ended up on my stack because I randomly wandered around a local bookstore while my daughter searched for something to buy. I ended up finding one of the best books I have read in a while.

The excitement of that kind of discovery will never leave me. I will probably use the shopping function on my Kindle to identify books I want to buy in a bookstore more than I will to download something new. I can justify spending $10 or more on a physical book than I can on a computer file. But I also have used it to find some low-priced books from unknown writers. I may have never found these kinds of books in a small bookstore.

So I can find something worthwhile in each method even if it does mean a punch in the jaw once in a while.