Amazon’s second generation Kindle, the D00511.

Recent months have seen an increase of posts and news items on the coming eBook revolution.  This way of delivering books has been a bit slower to catch on than proponents had hoped.  The Amazon Kindle reader was touted as the solution to the many reasons why readers weren’t taking to eBooks, and it did provides some pretty impressive features.  As new technologies go, this one was an impressive debut.  The inability to read .pdf files struck me as a serious flaw which may or may not be corrected by now.  I nearly gagged, however, at the idiotic business model that had one paying hundreds for the Kindle unit, and buying books at prices comparable to the hard copy versions.  I always thought that if you cut out the cost of typesetting, layout, printing, binding, and shipping, you ought to be able to sell electronic books for roughly the price of a song on iTunes.  Silly me.  The price of the books needs to come down a bit further.  As things stand now, for the several dollars needed to buy a book, I can get the real book second-hand from abebooks.com and enjoy the presence of a hard copy that has heft and can stare out at me from a bookshelf, teasing, inviting, mocking, or daring me.  More on that later.

Where periodicals are concerned, however, I can see the value.  If nothing else it keeps the piles of discarded newspapers and magazines from accumulating, and I like the green aspect of it.

The PRS700 reading device by Sony.

eBooks are also being hailed as a new venue for self-publishing in contrast to the staid, stodgy traditional book publishing industry.  It is true that it takes well over a year to get a book ready for publication, but it need also be said that a lot of that time is unavoidable, painstaking work that makes for high-quality content.  Unless you are Anne Coulter’s publisher, serious editing, fact-checking, etc. takes time.  You can’t rush it.  This is one reason why so many self-published books are just bloody awful.  But I think this will change.  Throughout history, when a new technology is applied to a traditional task, the initial results are always messy and sloppy.  Giving desktop publishing power to ordinary people back in the mid-80’s spawned a flurry of documents that had no sense of design or how to use fonts.  Now most people seem to have acquired that skill or know enough to farm it out to someone who can do the thing right.  So we can expect this newest tool for self-publishing to find it’s equilibrium.  In Japan novels written especially to be read on a cell phone have become very popular.  Some genres of books may lend themselves more to eBook self-publishing than others.

The iRex DR1000 digital reader.

But all these gripes aside, I think it will only be a matter of time before I get myself some kind of mobile eBook reading device.  It may be a Kindle, or something else.  I still have some issues with the whole concept, although I know that most other people won’t share my needs.  For one thing, we have a large print library.  It has a lot of out of print books.  Will I be able somehow to get those books in electronic form?  If they are in the public domain, Google Books might be one way to get them.  But if not, I don’t see how I can do that without paying for the book a second time.  That rankles, especially in hard times.

By training, temperment, and passion, I am a scholar.  A guerrilla scholar, if you please.  So when I have a book I really like, I tend to make notes in the margins, underline things, and put little ticks in pencil beside paragraphs that strike me as particularly noteworthy.  As an old Jewish saying has it, “A virgin book bears no offspring.”  To the best of my knowledge, none of the reading devices have any software that will let you mark passages, add notes, compile bibliographies, and so forth.  Online library services like Questia will let you do this and by all accounts their software for such things is excellent.  For me, an eBook device must be more than a reader, I need to be able to do research with it.  I need to transfer those research notes from my reading device to my working computer.  Paper allows this.  Paper lasts.  Paper still works when batteries die or the power go out.  Paper books can be marked up or, in extreme cases, heaved across the room in indignation at an author’s stupidity–or insufferable brilliance.  They demand physical engagement and interaction.  Paper insists that you take the time to chew something over and explain to yourself why you are writing it down.  Certain older books have a smell that’s been compared to spices from a farway land.  The comparison is apt.

Moreover, in spite of search tools, there is still no real substitute for shelf browsing.  If you have your books arranged by subject (Ours are not so arranged yet, but we’re working on it) you often find material you would have missed if you had not browsed the shelves.  This is why most libraries arrange their collections this way, even though it is definitely the most expensive and time-consuming way to present a collection.

Another problem I have with eBooks, especially if they are sold through a major commercial outlet, is privacy.  What I read is nobody’s business except those with whom I choose to share my reading habits.  The thought of some heuristic algorithm deciding what tsunami of ads Amazon or Barnes and Noble will throw at me is bad enough.  But the notion that some over zealous “patriot” in the government will start passing judgment on my patriotism based on my collection of books is insufferable.  I am not the least bit persuaded by assurances of privacy by Amazon or anyone else when each day’s news brings more stories of private information lost or compromised, let alone more bullshit assurances of how we must sacrifice more privacy for the sake of national security. As more and more people trust their eLibraries to giant commercial servers, the information contained by those servers becomes a greater prize for the unscrupulous.  Used books, especially bought from a local dealer for cash, are private and anonymous.

But one of my biggest objections, ironically,  cannot possibly impact me directly, and that is the question of what happens when more and more of our knowledge is committed to silicon or optical media.  As long-term storage goes, this is about the worst option there is (See my article “Words That Survive” in the 05 January 2007 issue of The Citizen Scientist).  I like to consider myself as someone who thinks long-term.  If you want our descendants centuries hence to know anything about us, some information must be committed to what will survive.  Right now, that means acid-free, high-rag paper, kept at a constant temperature and low humidity.  It’s good for a few centuries at least.

I hope that the eBook “revolution” will address some of these problems soon, because if they do it could do wonders for me personally in my studies and writing.  But until that day, I’m hanging on to my books.