Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go." --Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The strange cell-phone-like metal tablet sat in its leather case on my dresser for a week. My 8-year-old son was curious about it, since it looked a lot like his GameBoy or Nintendo DS. He wanted to use it more than I did.
Although only 7 percent of Americans read e-books, I felt like one of the few holdouts of the digital reading revolution sweeping the country. E-book sales have more than doubled in each of the last three years, and Amazon.com is selling more Kindle books than paperbacks now. The price alone is enticing enough, with e-books roughly half the price of hardback books. Access, availability and portability are all benefits, and users can also read their Kindle books on other electronic devices.
E-reading is supposed to be the wave of the future, and some say the shift to e-books is inevitable. Pundits cite the rise of e-books as a major contributor to the demise of traditional brick-and-mortar bookstores like Borders. Even libraries are changing their circulations by offering more e-books and audiovisual items and fewer print books. Digital publishing is altering both readers and writers’ habits, and traditional print book sales are on the decline. But as an author and longtime book-lover, I’ve been holding out on this future by refusing to read complete books on anything but hard and soft-cover bindings stitched together from dead trees. I like the feel of a book – the ability to manually flip ahead or back to any page I wish. I even like the smell of books. If it’s new I imagine the printing process that went into the careful selection of typography and the binding and stitching; if it’s old I like to imagine the owner who had it last. The pages connect me both to the author and past readers in a surreal, vicarious way that makes the printed book a special and valued possession. I view books not as convenient reading vehicles or as collectible pieces, but as John Milton did, as the “precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on a purpose to a life beyond life.”
I could not think of this electronic device on loan from the local library as a book or even a reading device to books. So when I had time to read, I would pick up a “real” book from my bookshelf and take it with me, leaving the Kindle in its purse-like holder. But with just a few days to go before the Kindle was due to be returned, I took the plunge. I slowly unzipped the case and looked at this thin, black tablet with a screen the size of an average printed photograph (which may also be doomed for extinction). An image of Agatha Christie stared at me from the screen, imploring me to explore.
“Slide and release the power switch to view” the laminated page of instructions read. As I did Agatha disappeared and a list of titles instantly popped up on screen – 72 titles to be exact – that the local library had already uploaded for me. Sarah Palin’s America by Heart; The Autobiography of Mark Twain; John Grisham’s new novel, The Confession; Tom Clancy’s Dead or Alive; Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants; even Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein was on the list. I scrolled down the list and highlighted one called Less Is More, a book about graphics and presentations. After discovering that I could ‘turn’ pages by clicking on the forward arrow key, I started reading. Scanning through the screen pages, I was surprised to see some blank pages with a note that said “These page notes require the use of PowerPoint.” Evidently this software wasn’t installed on this particular Kindle, so I couldn’t view all pages in this book.
Scanning the list of books again, I chose a Stephen Hawking book to peruse next. Reading a book on a small screen was not as uncomfortable as I imagined – the screen was bright and the words clear and legible. It took just a few minutes to get used to the page “blink” that happens each time you press the ‘Next Page’ button. While the words were easy to read, the graphics were not; cartoons and other images reproduced from the book did not appear as clear as the text. What did prove uncomfortable was not the process of reading, but the physical feel of the device. Holding the Kindle proved to be problematic for me, at least at first. Do I hold it up on my knees? Prop it up in front of my face? Straddle it on my chest? Hold it with both palms? When I placed my fingers on the device, I sometimes accidentally hit the wrong button and lost my place in the book. Once it slid off my lap while reading.
Since I had already started reading The Autobiography of Mark Twain: Vol. I, a 737-page, 2-inch thick hardback book given to me as a Christmas present, I decided to try and pick it up on the Kindle, to compare reading experiences. I had dog-eared page 144 on Twain’s book, the place where he had recalled meeting American newspaper publisher Horace Greeley. How would I find this place on the Kindle version?
The directions read: ‘Press Menu while inside the book to activate search functions.” I typed in “Greeley” and pressed location number 4136 – success! Now I could curl up in bed with a cozy machine to read my favorite American author.
The experiment surprised me. Unlike the large printed book, the Kindle version of Twain’s autobiography was obviously lighter to hold and actually easier to read. Although the printer of Twain’s autobiography used a readable font (Adobe Garamond) for the text, the typeface was too small for my taste. The Kindle version, on the other hand, had a font size that could be changed to suit your taste. If you wanted the text bigger, you could easily make it bigger. You could even change your preferred words per line. One minor difference in the Kindle version of Twain’s work irritated me: the Kindle did not italicize the editor’s notes, often used as a preface to Twain’s entries, which left me momentarily confused as to who was writing – Twain or one of the editors.
One strong advantage of the Kindle or the other e-readers like the Nook is the ability to make annotations – bookmarks, highlights, and notes. You can take notes on the mini-keyboard at the bottom of the e-reader, or you can highlight text by pressing the Menu button and selecting “My Notes and Marks,” then electronically highlight the text (which appears with a gray underline). You can also import your notes and highlights into a Microsoft Word document. Privacy advocates have criticized Amazon for collecting this information, however, and a new Kindle feature now lets users choose to make their notes and highlights available for others to see.
After becoming accustomed to holding the Kindle, I read Twain’s work swiftly: Indeed, it seemed more swiftly than I would have read in the hardback book, although this was probably due to the smaller font in the printed autobiography. I never had to adjust the screen brightness, which was crystal clear in daylight or in artificial light. I trained myself to read differently with the Kindle, which eschews the tactile sensation one has reading a printed book in favor of the visual sensation. After reading for awhile, my fingers wanted to “leaf through” pages that weren’t there. I have a habit of leafing back in a book’s prior pages to review; but with a Kindle, I would have to do a computer-like search. Sure, I could search like I do on Google for specific references, but I couldn’t manually review or preview pages like I do through a book or newspaper. But after about one hour of reading, I became accustomed to reading on the screen, and could easily press a button called “Bookmark” to leave the e-book for a lunch break. When I returned, I began where I left off, and read easily and speedily. I began to like reading this way.
When I had to return the Kindle, I did not want to part with it. I actually preferred reading Twain’s book on the Kindle, because the hardback was too bulky and heavy to read comfortably. My experiment with Kindle left me ambivalent towards the device. I wanted to buy one now, but I also felt I have too many older books in my library waiting to be read. I also felt guilty that I liked reading a book on a Kindle.
My reasons for not liking the Kindle were more philosophical than practical. The news of the Borders bankruptcy made me feel like anyone who buys a Kindle or a Nook e-reader is contributing to the disappearance of bookstores. The printed word maintains an enduring value that e-books don’t possess. When my own nonfiction book was published, I felt as sense of accomplishment and permanence that could never be replaced by online publishing. Printed books are part of history that online books can never be. Are book signings also doomed for extinction? (For one author’s hilarious take on this, see this You Tube video at http://youtu.be/v24BqTv8v5U .
I also object to Amazon’s push to “connect” the Kindle to the Internet. An Internet-connected Kindle would destroy the book reading experience, which is designed to be a deliberative, reflective process of quiet solitude. Connecting a book to the sporadic whims of Google searches and the bombardment of online games and social media plug-ins would not be book-reading, but would be a kind of Web-reading that encourages scanning and online distractions that a real book takes us away from. It also left me wondering whether I actually read faster on the Kindle, or did I read like I do on the Web, non-linearly and less focused, favoring browsing and scanning over sustained deep reading? I wonder how much information e-readers comprehend versus book readers. Do book readers process more or less than e-readers?
Amazon’s push to make reading a social occasion is also disturbing because the company collects data on every reader’s habits. Not only does Amazon know what books you download, they know what passages of the books most interest you. Readers can “rate” the book and share messages with their online social networks. Amazon also lets you see how many others have highlighted specific passages in a book. What’s next? Stop what you’re reading to have instant chats about a passage you’ve just marked? Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book thinks so. “Soon, books will literally have discussions inside of them, both live chats and asynchronous exchanges through comments and social annotation. You will be able to see who else out there is reading the book and open up a dialog with them." See http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6332156.html
As writers, we are told we have to adapt to this new erratic, interrupted form of reading, that we have to tailor our works to new websites and social media networks to be relevant, but I hope that’s not the future of books. Books remain books because of the solitary enjoyment they provide us; not because of the shared experience by the distracted consumer culture on the World Wide Web – a culture that values impatience, disruptions, and ever-more fast information retrieval over the focused, contemplative literary culture. The process of solitary reading requires sustained, focused attention where individuals read for the sake of personal fulfillment and enlightenment, and I fear the e-readers are changing that process.
Perhaps my refusal to buy an e-reader has more to do with principles than convenience and simplicity. If I bought an e-reader, am I buying another nail in the coffin for the brick-and-mortar bookstore? Is it a coincidence that Amazon.com named its e-reader the “kindle," a word that means ignite or set ablaze? Is the Kindle starting a fire to burn the printed word of books, like the firefighters of the future did in Fahrenheit 451? Or is the Kindle a boon to reading, enncouraging people to read more, not less? That’s the question book lovers are grappling with today, and the debate is just beginning.
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