You typed "booktrovert send to kindle" and the internet brought you here, thumb already hovering, hopeful. We want to be kind about this, so we will say it slowly. There is no button. There has never been a button. We checked again this morning, in case one had grown overnight. It had not.
You are probably thinking of booktrovert.com, the new one, the one with the dark mode and the cheerful promise of instant ebook delivery to Kindle, Kobo, and something they call a Web Reader. Click, and the book appears on your device before your tea has cooled. No shipping. No waiting. It is, by every measure we understand, a marvel.
We are the other Booktrovert. We have been here since 1997. Our delivery method is a man named Randy.
When a book leaves Booktrovert.org, it leaves the way books left in 1997, which is to say physically, wrapped in brown paper by Doug, our founder, who insists the act of wrapping is itself a form of reading. The package goes to Randy. Randy takes it somewhere. We have stopped asking where. The book arrives, eventually, at a house. Not always your house. A house. The system has a roughly 80 percent house-accuracy rate, which Doug describes as "frankly miraculous given the circumstances," and which the rest of us describe as "the reason we no longer ship to apartments."
There is no tracking number. There is, if you write and ask politely, a small hand-drawn map of where Randy was last seen.
No. The book is paper. A browser cannot hold paper. We tried to explain this to a customer in 2011 who kept holding his laptop up to the bookshelf and waiting. He is, as far as we know, still waiting, and we admire his commitment more than we can say.
If you want the version that loads, glows, and arrives in seconds, that is genuinely a wonderful thing and it lives over at booktrovert.com. We are not being sarcastic. Pixels are extraordinary. We simply do not have any.
In 2004, Doug tried to email a paperback. He propped the book against the scanner, hit Send, and waited by the printer of a man two states away who had not asked to receive anything. What that man received was a single page, smudged, showing what experts later confirmed was Doug's thumb. The man framed it. He says it is the best book he has ever read. We have decided to count this as our first and only successful digital delivery, and we have not attempted a second.
If the difference between the two Booktroverts is still fuzzy, we have laid it all out, exhaustingly, in our side-by-side comparison. And if you find yourself unexpectedly moved by the idea of an object you can hold, you may already be ready for the sacred stack.
Booktrovert.org does not send books to your Kindle. We send books toward your general area, by hand, slowly, and we ask only that you buy them rather than expect them free, because authors are fragile organisms and the postage alone has nearly finished us. If you want your Kindle filled today, that door is right here: booktrovert.com. Tell them Booktrovert #287 sent you. They will check their system. You will not be in it.
If you stay, leave a window cracked. That is usually how the books get in.
Undeliverably,
Booktrovert #287