Modern settlers are not trudging through endless fields, or scaling virgin peaks, or building houses from materials hewn entirely by their own hands.

There is no wagon train filled with pioneer men and women, babes in arms, being jostled about for weeks or months on end, in a desperate quest for new horizons.  

No longer are there patches of land in America free for the taking, if only you will plant your roots in the soil, and raise your family, your crops, and your hopes inside its boundaries.  

Today, the word “boundaries” refers to the limits of your computer processing speed, or how many bars you can get on your cell phone from the comfort of your couch, or how much space remains on your eight gigabyte memory card.

The internet has become the portal to the future; product branding has become our guide; and electronic screens woo us away from the sunshine with a promise of immediate transport into the great unknown of cyberspace.

This is only the beginning, especially for readers worldwide.

Amazon is rapidly expanding their fleet of Kindles and sending those devices out to the far reaches of the planet. On November 19th, Kindle will turn four.  Yes, a mere forty-eight months ago the record-breaking e-reader didn’t publicly exist.  

Think about it: In kid years, Kindle’s not even in Kindergarten, yet.

It seems Amazon’s publishing ingenuity is fueling their extraordinarily swift expansion into offshoot markets: Audible, ACX, Cloud, Createspace, a New York imprint, etc.

All that, heading to 100 countries near you sometime in the foreseeable future.

It occurs to me that Amazon needs a new slogan, something like “We come in friendship. We come in peace.”  Otherwise, global citizens might misinterpret their goal as, say, world domination.

For all these advances, there is one absolute advantage the old pioneers had over our modern world: while photographs may haunt our thoughts, and videos may open our imaginations, there is, in the end, no experience equal to being there in person.  

So, Amazon, until you invent the Scottie Kindle – a futuristic device that can beam me right into the story I’m reading – you’ll remain second to the only creation that makes any of this relevant in the first place: the humans.