Results tagged “reading”

An interesting breakdown of the ecological consequences of the e-book vs. the printed book. The short version is that you need to buy about 50-100 e-books before it pays for itself, environmentally speaking.

This sounds like it should be a shoo-in for a voracious reader like me, but it's not that simple. The biggest problem I have with e-readers is that they're not books, and reading on them is still deeply distracting. I chalk this up to generational differences: I wasn't raised reading from a screen, and so I suspect people who grow up surrounded by this sort of thing won't mind one bit. From what I can tell, they love it, and I can see why: you don't lose your place, you can find any phrase by typing, and so on.

But the effort required to train myself to read on one of those things hardly seems worth it when most of what I want to read isn't even available in this format in the first place. I don't read paper books because they're "better" (although there's an argument to be made there), I read them because right now that's the only way to get what I want. Nine-tenths of the books I seek out aren't available in any digital form at all, and there's not much cost savings, if only because most of the real cost of making any book is not materials but paying everyone involved along the way whose name isn't on the cover.

The ecological side of it has another dimension not encompassed by the article. Books are inherently lendable. E-books, less so. A friend of mine wanted to buy me a copy of a certain Kindle book as a gift and couldn't really do that: he had to buy me a gift card with the ASIN of the book in question as the gift note.

A friend of mine asked me the other day: "So when are you getting a Kindle?"

I said, "Around the time winged pigs circumnavigate the frozen-over reaches of hell."

My friend was, to say the least, taken aback. He knows I'm not a Luddite. I work in the tech biz; both of my computers are up-to-date and quite nicely tricked out; I even got on the Blu-ray train quite early.

But the Kindle, even in its 2.0 incarnation, still makes me feel like I'm being cheated out of something. It isn't a substitute for a book. It can't be, because it is everything a book is not, and that is exactly the problem.

I've written about this before, and since then I've found my stance has only grown all the firmer. The changing of the number to the left of the decimal point doesn't change the fact that the Kindle is a chunk of plastic and electronics.

First, some praise. I like the Kindle as a way to get certain kinds of information. As a replacement for a pile of textbooks that you're just going to sell back to the store at the end of the semester, for instance. I fully expect it to become a killer educational device. Or as a way to get fast facts, or as a way to consume things that would normally require some recycling to stay out of landfills (magazines, papers, etc.). But not as a substitute for the technology that has served us in good stead for longer than the language I write this in has existed.

I don't think the Kindle was devised as a substitute for the paper book. I'm fairly sure it was seen by its inventors as a complement to it — a way to make reading a little less cumbersome. Now you don't have to lug around all those books! they say. But to me that just shows their prejudices all the more: if a book is good, I don't care how much lugging is involved. The fact that I have to lug the books around makes me all the more selective and deliberate about my reading.

Technology has given us movies and music to go, and that's all acceptable to me. Movies and music have always been a little bit abstract. The movie is over there on the screen — oh, wait! Someone turned off the TV or the projector. Now it's gone. Likewise the symphony or the White Album. Lift the needle or eject the disc, and it disappears. But reading has always been bound to its carrier, doubly so, like a painting on a wall where the brushstrokes can be seen in just the right light. The act of reading IS the book.

The very fact that you have to put a book down to get away from it is not a design flaw. It is its greatest attraction. A book is built to lionize the senses. It commands your eyes with its print and its design; its paper and edges enlist your sense of touch; and I doubt there's any serious reader who doesn't get a nice little perk at the smell of a new book, either. (A friend of mine, now dead, used to stand in the entrances of bookstores and take deep breaths in through his nose as if preparing to do his calisthenics. People stared; I laughed.) The Kindle's Internet connection and quick links to dictionaries and online encyclopedias only give you all the more reason to not let what you're reading fully command your attention. They are that many more ways to distract ourselves in the name of "extending the conversation".

A book, once purchased, confers ownership. It is yours until the pages falls out, and even long after that. The Kindle puts you in the position of being a perennial renter, at least as far as its Amazon-supplied media goes. What good is being able to take your library with you, when the can take it away from you just as easily?

I don't say this because I have an axe to grind against technology or computers or blogs. I savor all of those things. I also savor being able to leave them all behind. Sometimes I simply want to sit with something in my hands that could have been produced at any time in the past few thousand years of the history of our species, and use that as my method of transportation to places I could never go and people that no one would ever meet.

Before writing this, I was reading the second of the Moribito novels (I looked at the first one last year), and was marveling at how the publishers had created something I wanted to hold in my hands. Everything from the texture of the cover wraps to the choice of ink color — this book was designed by someone who loved books, and who wanted to make sure you picked it up and had as few excuses as possible to put it down. It didn't hurt that the book itself was a good read.

Irving Wallace, a writer I am not fond of, nonetheless managed to find it in himself to say in one of his own novels that a book was not just a wad of paper. It was humanity, civilization, life itself. Its very immutability, its very existence as an artifact and an end result, is not something to be resisted any more than a black-and-white movie is to be seen as a coloring book waiting to have digital makeup slapped over it.

I'm prepared to be proven wrong. But I reserve the right to have my reading in the form of sewn leaves that require only ambient light to be useful. Some things never go out of style, because they were never fashion to begin with. Andrei Codrescu once lamented how the onion, the fragrant little bulb that was the core of his Romanian childhood, was being chased out of the kitchen for being declassé and hincty. If we let them chase away the book for being bulky and primitive, then we get what we deserve.

A good weekend was had by all. Went down to my friend Sarah's house for her birthday, enjoyed games and good cooking, Chinese buffets and Japanese import PS2 games. It's taking more time than I thought to get caught up, but I should be completely back to business by tomorrow. Look for some new material by then, in a couple of different departments.

A piece in the Times about Amazon's Kindle got behind some of the usual statistics about the fact that "no one reads anymore".  It's something of a misinterpretation.  Those that do read more than make up for the many who don't — in other words, while about 30% of people surveyed recently claim not to have read a book in the past year, another 30% have read at least fifteen in the same timeframe.  (Note that while books are mentioned, there's no discussion [at least not here] of newspapers, websites, blogs, etc.)

There's a lot of further nuances to this whole discussion that convince me that reading — not just "books" — is far from dead as a leisure or self-education activity.  The web, for one, has made it easier than ever to get your hands on text (hey, you're reading some right now!), and also acquire books in general — something Amazon knows from the inside out, which is part of the reason they tend to be one of the first places people go when looking for a book they can't find.  And on top of all that, publishing stands to be a $15 billion industry this year, according to the article's references — hardly a dying market.

Oddly enough, I'm reminded of the video-game market.  There are many people who never play video games, never touch them, never bother with them.  They're heavily counterbalanced by all the people who not only do all those things, and do them with an enthusiasm that far outstrips expectations.

It is frustrating, though, to encounter people who simply don't read for pleasure or self-enlightenment.  One of my pet theories about such people is that a fair chunk of them may simply have undiagnosed or untreated reading disabilities — e.g., they were taught with a non-phonic / "whole word" reading method which often creates functional illiterates — and so reading isn't something they want to put themselves through, no matter what the reward.  I'm not wholly convinced we live in a "post-literate" culture except in the sense that people think they can get bigger kicks elsewhere, and usually can.

Maybe this is the best way to put it: We live in a culture where nobody reads the people who grouse that nobody reads anymore.