I am not an early adopter, although I am married to one. I am also not a Luddite, and for proof of that statement, I will point out that I am blogging this and not pecking out an angry letter-to-the-editor on any of the three manual typewriters that I own. I just got an iPhone 4S to replace the iPhone 3G that I had and which might fairly be described as one of the great loves of my life. When it comes to new technology, I’ve come, increasingly, to have a McCluhanesque approach to things. As each thing comes out, I wonder, “What is this an extension of? What does it give us? What does it take away? What is the benefit and what is the cost and is this a tradeoff I want to make? What effect is it likely to have on society?”
I bring this up mostly because of an article in the New York Review of Books called “Ebooks Can’t Burn” by a gentleman named Tim Parks, an article I came across because of a tweet on Twitter by one Jonny Geller (@jonnygeller) that was retweeted by Graham Linehan (@glinner). Mr Geller referred to this article as “[t]he most intelligent argument on the differences between reading e or print book[s] I’ve read,” which is strong praise indeed. This is a subject which is generally subject to boosterism rather than rational thought with all discussion rooted firmly in either the Early Adopter (“Golly gee willikers! Isn’t it neat?”) or Luddite (“Get those damn kids off my lawn!”) columns. (In the interests of fair disclosure, I have written about Kindles, from more toward the Luddite perspective, twice before, here and here.)
The article that I encountered was written in a manner that was calm almost to the point of world-weariness and could have been read beautifully by George Sanders. That tone, however delightful a camouflage, did not mean that the article itself was neutral or free from boosterism. It just delivered its pitch with a sang froid that made it distinct.
Mr Parks’s point-of-view is unrelentingly in the corner of the ebook, and he seems to see himself as its champion, defending its honor from the attacks of such literary bullies as Jonathan Franzen. He needn’t have worried. The literati he cites are fighting a rear-guard action in a battle that never existed. Like so many on both sides of this question (and me for a period of time), they do not understand that this is not an either/or question and that the most likely scenario is that books will survive for as long as books will survive in both formats. Just because ebooks have arrived does not mean that traditional books are doomed. This is a fear formed in the irrationality of love, and it is not axiomatic that because the word processor ran the typewriter from the field that the ebook will do the same to the traditional book. There’s room for both.
In fact, in Mr Parks’s comparison of the act of reading both, he finds almost no difference, except for one. The traditional book allows one to thumb through it, which can be a handy thing when one is trying to remember who a minor character is or what did that character say about that subject back in Chapter 9. Mr Parks, though, seems to see that advantage (and, for the record, that kind of skimming and jumping is possible with an ebook, the process is merely more cumbersome) and an imperfection. After establishing, basically by fiat, that
[t]he e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience[,]
he goes on to posit that
the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text,
and finishes with the coup de grâce:
This is a medium for grown-ups.
Ouch. Traditional books are for babies and ebooks are for grown-ups! Who’d a thunk it? Does this apply to children’s books that are in ebook format? Is it more grown up to read “Goodnight, Moon” as an ebook than “Crime and Punishment” in a traditional format? This strikes me as specious and less reasoning than subtle name-calling.
Unlike almost every other defender of a new technology, Mr Parks makes a fetish of linearity. Whereas with most of today’s gizmos, where the ability to zig and zag across texts and ideas is seen as a strength, Mr Parks sees the great virtue of the ebook (and, actually, the ereader) as being that it forces one to read the text only in sequence, there being no past or future, only a continuous now of words in procession. This, it seems to me, is to reduce the act of reading to the level of the forced march, and has more in common with the Bataan Death March than it does to any sublime aesthetic experience. It is more grown up in the same sense that being chained to a chair is more grown up than the exercise of liberty.
But this gets to the heart of what is wrong with closed-source ereaders: They are inherently totalitarian.
And this is something Mr Parks doesn’t understand. He thinks that “you can’t burn e-books,” but the reality is that book burning would simply be unnecessary. As Amazon has demonstrated in cases where there were questions over copyright, books can be eliminated right from your own device with nothing more than a click of a mouse somewhere in the Northwest. No muss, no fuss, no breaking down of doors or making sacrificial pyres for printed tomes, an act that at once destroys and ennobles the item being burned. The book in question simply disappears, like a left-winger in Pinochet’s Chile. It cannot be hidden, it cannot be buried, it cannot be squirreled away until the madness has passed.
As long as ereaders and their descendants (apps and programs for phone, iPad, and computer screen) are permitted to be closed-source, as long as they chain you to a retailer, as long as digital books can be snatched from the Cloud with a click of a mouse, the whole ebook phenomenon will be inherently totalitarian. This doesn’t mean that I think that ebooks should or even could be banned. They are here and will remain. However, at least for the time being, I will refrain from buying a Kindle or a Nook or any of their brethren. I will hope for open-source versions and for publishers and writers to realize that they no longer need the intermediary of online retailers to reach their customers, that those retailers are the shadows of yesterday’s behemoths, a needless intermediary in the democratic conversation between author and reader.
