I HAVE SEEN the future, and it doesn’t look good. A world without books would be a terribly diminished place. But it feels like we are being pushed there.

Ray Bradbury wrote about this in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian vision of a society ruled by an intrusive government and a public numbed by wall-sized high-definition TVs. In that society, books are illegal because, don’t you know, they pose questions, undermine political power and stir bad feelings. Jack-booted firemen race around with lighter fluid and flamethrowers, burning any secret stashes that are found, and arresting those mad enough to keep them.

Some 55 years later, elements of the world Mr. Bradbury described seem to be coming into focus. Except that firemen are not doing it. We are doing this to ourselves, destroying the culture of print, and its culture of thinking, through digital technology.

As I write this, I hold in my hand an object designed to replace traditional books with mere data — a product called, ominously enough in light of Mr. Bradbury’s novel, the Kindle.

A decades-long friend of mine loves his — he reads The Washington Post every day on it, instead of on paper — and sent me one as a ($350) birthday present. Considering it the devil’s spawn, I thanked him profusely but begged him for permission to return it and reimburse him. He wanted me to have it, though, and said he would be insulted if I did.

Produced by the online book dealer Amazon, it is, in truth, handsome and user-friendly, off-white with a small keyboard and a clear, easy-to-read screen. It is roughly the size and weight of a thin paperback.

The convenience is undeniable. You don’t have to go out in the rain to get a soggy newspaper thrown into a hedge by a carrier with bad aim. You simply turn on the Kindle and there is the day’s paper. You can get virtually any new book you want in a matter of seconds (generally for around $10), all without going to a bookstore or library, or paying postage or (apparently) taxes. The Kindle communicates through something called Whispernet.

Want to dip into a book before buying? I clicked onto the Kindle store and requested a sample of Chris Elliott’s Into Hot Air: Mounting Mount Everest. Almost instantly, his trademark wince-inducing rantings were before my eyes: “My brief marriage to famed designer Vera Wang had ended abruptly in an ugly custody battle over my collection of vintage 1980s Girbaud pants, and my one-man show as Ethel Merman had just closed Off Broadway due to numerous complaints by the board of health.”

If the print seems too small, you can easily bump it up. To find any passage, you can run a quick search on the text. It even downloads and plays background music.

Perhaps the greatest convenience it affords is that it can put an entire library — up to about 250 books — into that one thin device. If you want 250 more, you can just plug in another memory chip.

I have a home library. Moving it means piling up backbreaking box loads, and lugging them around, grunting and cursing the day I was born. With a Kindle and its memory chips, I could easily move far more books than that in the pocket of a coat.

Since books transmitted by Kindle require no expensive manufacturing costs, they never go out of print. And I have found Kindle useful for buying affordable digital copies of baseball books published in the 1880s.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is, it’s important to touch real things.

I love books. I love their smell, the paper and glue and cloth covers. I love the feeling of turning a page. I love taking an ultra-sharp pencil and jotting notes in the margin, or starring or underlining passages, using a bookmark as a guide.

I like rifling through the pages while I read, seeing at a glance exactly how much is left to go.

I respect books, and discard them more reluctantly than a drunk discards a full bottle of whiskey. I think these physical objects, produced with great care, are lasting monuments to their authors, who usually earn a pittance for their sacrifices. I hate to see them vanish into the electronic ether.

I fear that books, reduced to digital information, will be — like music — easily stolen, depriving authors and publishers of their hard-earned rewards.

Ultimately, reading — at least, the kind that sires reflection — is not about speed and convenience. It is about halting the madness of life, getting away from the electronic bombardment, and spending some time to ponder. A culture that no longer values such activity is bound to shed its freedom.

Thinking — not just information — is important. Electronics split knowledge into wonderfully sort-able bits, but only print, I believe, puts those pieces back together into a coherent whole. It seems to have something to do with neurology.

A book does not jam, malfunction, run out of battery power or need to be plugged in. It can be taken anywhere, into any nook and cranny, opened and used.

And books look beautiful on wooden shelves. They give off a kind of glow, a warmth. I love to browse through them, to take one down, smile at a memorable phrase, or weigh whether to read or reread it. I have more, certainly, than I will ever get to. But I like to have them around.

A list on a computer screen is just not the same.

Edward Achorn is The Journal’s deputy editorial-pages editor ( eachorn@projo.com).