E-books

As usual I am a bit slow on the uptake, but I've recently felt compelled to share my views on a phenomenon that claims to have revolutionized the way we read (at least this is undoubtedly how Amazon promotes it). I am talking, of course, about the Kindle; the device that allows a single person to carry with them an entire library of books in one small tablet. There are any number of devices that have attempted, with various degrees of success, to imitate the same concept, but for the sake of our conversation here, I will focus on the Kindle itself.

Now, I am by no means a Luddite. Despite my stodgy, vintage, professory exterior I do, in fact, enjoy a great deal of technology. I have a smartphone, I love Garageband and my MAC, I have even seen the merit of using classroom technology, and I have even embraced certain aspects of electronic classrooms. But I also think it is important to approach each new leap in social and professional technology with a certain level of skepticism. Undoubtedly, part of this paranoia stems from a sci-fi geek's subconscious fear of a Matrix-like universe. But a great deal of it has to do with a separation of two concepts that are often conflated in a commercialized society like ours: technological advances and Progress. I use a capital P on purpose since we must realize that, when speaking of Progress, we don't simply mean that we have placed one foot in front of the other; indeed we might very well be walking backward. When I say Progress I mean that we have made advances that truly lead to the betterment of the world around us. The use of software like Skype to connect family members across the world would be a prime example of Progress; the use of a Flash media player to watch porn would not...but I digress. When thinking about a technological invention like the Kindle in terms of Progress I must force myself to consider what it is actually adding to the reading experience.

I have to admit that one of the most attractive aspects of e-readers, especially the Kindle, is the instantaneous and free access to public-domain material. Being a medievalist, this means that I have essentially gained access to every book I could ever want at no charge, provided I have the patience to read it on the screen of my Droid. Bullocks to the New York Bestseller's list; it has been ages since I have picked up a book that was written after 1950. I understand, of course, that I'm probably not the target market for the Kindle, those who live and die by those lists being Amazon's moneypot, but I have to admit that I do get a profound grin when I can download a digital copy of Chaucer's Troilus and Creseyde without paying a penny.

But is this access worth the price? "But" you will say "you just said that you didn't pay a cent!" This is true. But I think there is a higher price to pay for instant access to every book you could ever want. When you sit down and think about it logically, how many books can a person possibly be engaged in at any given time? I probably have far to many forlorn bookmarks on my shelves but in reality, I am only truly engaged in a single book at a time. Even when traveling I can hardly expect to make it through more than two volumes at a stretch. It took me nearly my entire 20-day European vacation to make it through Holy Blood, Holy Grail which I reviewed last month. But this kind of practicality is in neither part of the marketing technique, nor the burgeoning reading culture being fostered by e-readers. Amazon makes money based on the quantity of books you purchase. This is their primary reason for including a Wi-fi and 3G feature into their devices (despite the Siren call of automatically-updating e-newspapers). Does this mean, then, that each member of the reading public is essentially being encouraged to have their noses in as many different texts as possible at any given time? Probably. And isn't this simply an extension of the Attention Deficit being cultivated by websites with multitudes of hotlinks that will access countless pages of condensed information at any given time? I must again answer in the affirmative.

In my series of admissions I must also admit that I am a casualty of this very same culture. So often in conversation I find myself attempting to recall the source of a particular piece of information and wind up wondering if I had found it in one of the many academic articles that I have downloaded in PDF format (I may dedicate an entire blog to this alone) or one of my casual forays into Wikipedia. Undoubtedly this confusion has forced upon me a certain staunch sense of third-party-nostalgia since, as I understand so many of the intelligent men and women who existed in the days before sound-bites and streaming video, the ability to quote poetry and prose was so much more profound. I think this must be partially due to the fact that, when there was no Facebook to interrupt a reader after each chapter in a good book, there was only the book itself. When people read, they did so to understand. For some reason I imagine men like Ben Franklin or Winston Churchill sitting down in their respective studies and reading the first stanza of Milton's Paradise Lost. And when they arrive at the end of the stanza, rather than reward themselves by hopping on Netflix.com for a quick episode of Dr. Who, they simply sat and thought about what they had just read, or even went back to read some of the most profound stanzas and committing them to memory because the experience had been pure, profound, and uninterrupted. There was only the one volume of poetry in their hands; to get up and walk to the bookcase for another volume would be to break the poet's spell, and who really want's that?

Not Amazon, of course; the commodity of reading must demand the breaking of spells on a regular basis. God forbid a person grow attached to the physical experience of breaking spines (though, I don't agree with this practice), smelling paper, dog-earning pages, underlining passages, feeling through leaves, or simply forcing themselves to commit a portion of their time to a Book (capital B).