I was walking at dawn the other day, listening on the iPhone to KUT, the Austin NPR outlet. I briefly sat at the stoop across from the Episcopal church to check the weather forecast, see if I had any e-mail, text-message my fiancé and look at my calendar to see what the workday beheld.

After I did all this and reconnected to KUT — for some reason you can't listen to NPR on the iPhone and perform these other tasks, a glitch I'm sure will soon be rectified — I commenced walking again. It struck me that I take for granted so much that has changed in so short a time.

I spend a lot of time hanging out with a bright 12-year-old — my fiance's daughter. I rely on this bright child to help me figure out how to use gadgets. Kids at that age have a natural inclination for this stuff. I am no Luddite, at least most days, but neither am I particularly adept at figuring out the many iThings that many of us use every day.

For example, the other day I was picking her up from school. I have satellite radio in my hybrid SUV and listen to it whenever NPR news isn't playing. The satellite radio thoughtfully displays the song title on the dashboard display. It always has annoyed me that if the artist or song title is wordy, then the latter part gets cut off. So, "You Are the Sunshine of My Life," by Stevie Wonder becomes "You Are The Suns ... "

Most times, I can figure it out. Sometimes I can't. The child pushed a couple of buttons one day and brought up the latter part of the title. My head swiveled.

"How did you do that?" I asked.

She explained if you push the right-cursor key while holding down the text key it advances the display. How she knew that without reading directions I have no clue, other than she was born with the knack. And I wasn't. I have been driving this car nearly three years and haven't yet mastered the radio.

I'm "only" 54 years old, which I recognize skirts dinosaur territory to this child. Thus I can recall when hardware came from a store, albums were made of vinyl and the size of dinner plates, hardly anyone I knew had a color television, and nobody in East Texas admitted voting Republican — except in presidential races. For some reason, that was allowed.

* * *

About 15 years ago, I was introduced to the Internet largely as we know it today. I had a slow dial-up connection through Stephen F. Austin State University to something called Mosaic, which later became Netscape. I spent hours exploring this fascinating new medium, certain it would change the way we accessed knowledge.

I was right. Not original to me, of course. But I sat in front of my Macintosh SE going, "Whoa, this is so cool."

Fifteen years later, I can walk down the street with a phone the size of a wallet that costs less than a tenth of what that Mac did, and Google to remind myself who won the American League MVP award in 1996. Or where the nearest Starbuck awaits when in an unfamiliar city.

* * *

But still. There is at least one area where I will likely remain a Luddite until I croak. Books. I just can't bring myself to switch to reading books on an electronic device, such as a Kindle or one of its competitors. I have experimented with one owned by a friend, reasoning this would be a way to carry around thousands of books in a slim device, etc.

Forget it. I want to smell ink on paper, enjoy my finger turning a page, savor the comfortable heft of a book in my lap, make notes in the margin, loan it to a friend. I want to fan the pages from my bookmark toward the end, to figure out how much is left. I don't want to worry about spilling coffee on an electronic book and short-circuiting something, or dropping it on the concrete and losing an entire library.

I don't really care about much that I own except my books. They are great companions who don't demand anything except an occasional dusting and reading. I just can't imagine trading in my books for a piece of plastic that holds all that data. I would miss the smells, the covers, the memories evoked by the spaghetti stains, the inscriptions from friends who gave them, the random bookmarks in volumes temporarily abandoned.

There is much of this brave new technological world that I embrace, indeed celebrate. Just don't take away my books, please.

Gary Borders is publisher of the Longview News-Journal. E-mail: gborders@longview-news.com.