Whither Books?

I attended a conference in San Diego this past weekend, about “21st Century Book Marketing.” Inevitably, a great deal of it was about the ways in which technology is changing the book-publishing world. One speaker, Dan Poynter, flat-out said “Don’t bother going to a New York publisher,” predicting that in a few years they will all be, simply, gone, and that self-publishing, and electronic forms of books, will be the only game in anyone’s town. A subsequent speaker disagreed, saying that the industry is certainly changing but that the experience of a physical book won’t be replaced for a good long while yet.

Speaking as a person who loves books, and the physical form of a book, it is terribly hard to imagine ever abandoning that. And yet, I never thought I’d listen to music on a computer--now it’s almost the only way I ever listen to music. My CDs are all ripped, and iTunes just plays, one record after another, for as long as I want. The convenience so outweighs issues like sound quality that I really only use my big stereo in conjunction with the TV anymore. I still have all the CDs, but most of them haven’t been touched in years.

Are books following the same path? I still don't own a Kindle or any other e-reader, but I’m starting to want one, just as I once began to covet an iPod. Because I’m in the middle of five books right now, which is not at all unusual for me, and it would be kinda great to have them all together in a form that never weighs more than a few ounces. (Although it must be said--there’s some odd thing about the clutter of books that is part of their appeal. Book lovers love having great precarious piles of books in every corner. I will sometimes demonstrate to new visitors the extent of my obsession by opening the kitchen cabinets--to reveal that the top shelves, all the way around, are filled with books. Not cookbooks--theatre and film books, actually. I simply needed the shelf space more for books than for food.)

This weekend I was talking to someone at the conference (the marvelous LiYana Silver, who kinda blew my mind with her “Redefining Monogamy” ideas), and as we talked a man came around handing out copies of a novel he’d written. A physical book, words on paper. So I did what I always do, what I call the First Paragraph Test: I open to page one, read the first paragraph, and if it sounds like something I’ve read before, I abandon the book.

This book was easy. It only took four words for me to toss the book aside. “Don’t write at me,” I said to the book and by proxy its author, “if you’re not gonna do it well.” But the point here is that it’s hard to beat that particular experience. Sure you can look at previews of a book online--the Kindle offers them, in fact I’ve got the first several chapters of Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions on my iPhone’s Kindle app right now—but wandering through a bookstore, letting your eye wander, picking up books that look interesting, that you might never have thought of before, then doing the First Paragraph Test with a happy result, I don’t know that there can ever be an electronic replacement for that.

Just a few weeks ago I was in Borders, wandering, and came across a book by A. Roger Ekirch called At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, and it completely caught my attention. When the power goes out I’ve often thought about the world before electric light, but the moment I saw this book I immediately had the old thought: Why didn’t I think to write that? It had simply never occurred to me that that random thought might make an interesting book. But as soon as I saw it in the store, bells went off, and the perfect rightness of the idea became instantly self-evident.

An Amazon search, or a random browse through the Kindle’s lists, probably would have never turned up this book. You can never prove a negative, can never know what you never found, can never appreciate the opportunities that never crossed your path. And I find it terribly difficult to imagine a world where I can’t wander into a bookstore and hope for something, some glorious unknown and uncontemplated something, to leap off the shelves at me.

Which leaves the publishing industry where, exactly? Well, that probably depends on how many people like me are still out there. And I’m sure someone has run a study on those numbers, but I don’t think I want to know.

The Borders at the Third Street Promenade, one of my favorite places to go wander, closed a few months ago. It lasted long enough to drive out an earlier tenant, the fabulous Midnight Special bookstore, but then even the Borders went away. This may just be a train that is already leaving the station.

Reading Devices

On the one hand, I'm an old-fashioned bibliophile, one of those people who has books spilling out from every conceivable corner. (Go ahead, open my kitchen cabinets, I dare you.) I've always agreed with Isaac Asimov that a book is a perfect invention: it requires no batteries, it starts when you want it to start, stops when you want it to stop, waits for you with endless patience, and picks up right where you left it every time. Hours of entertainment, hours of education, a truly perfect invention, no question. And as Borges once wrote, "I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books." Exactly right.

But every time I move, I fill dozens of boxes with books. Hundreds of pounds of them, growing every year. Not to mention the aforementioned kitchen cabinets. When I travel, I generally limit myself to bringing two books, simply because of the weight and the bulk. This is no problem when traveling for a couple days; but for a month-long trip, two books might not be enough. And what if I'm on the road but need one of my many reference books?

This is why the idea of a "reading device" (there isn't a good name for these things yet) has some appeal. And since Amazon has just released the Kindle, I figured I'd take the occasion to write about this whole class of gadget a little.

The first e-book readers were basically limited-function computers, with LCD displays that had the same problems as computer screens: tough to read in daylight, and a glare that would absolutely hurt the eyes after too much reading. I liked the idea of them, but none of that early wave of devices was anywhere near as good as a book.

Then came this whole eInk development. Now we were starting to get somewhere: an LCD-like screen without glare, easily readable in daylight, something that really resembled a piece of paper, but one that you didn't have to flip in order to read what was printed on the other side of it. The Sony Reader was first, and it has a lot of advantages: it's light, it has decent capacity, and if you buy you get some books for free to get you started. One gigantic problem, though: it's not compatible with Macs, and in order to get books onto the Reader, you have to first interface with your computer. So much for that idea.

Now Amazon has released the Kindle, and it has one immediate advantage: no computers are involved at all, it operates wirelessly by downloading books from Amazon's servers, using what is basically Sprint's cellphone network--except that Amazon absorbs the cost of the wireless connection (and of course bundles it into the price of each individual book). (By the way, there's a decent comparison of the Reader and the Kindle here, on CNET's site.)

But there's a new problem: the Kindle itself is godawful ugly. I mean, look at it. It's horrifically, incomprehensibly ugly. And there are so many buttons, it looks almost impossible to hold without accidentally triggering something. This ugliness problem is no small thing--like it or not, the hip factor matters, and the Kindle could absolutely learn some things from, say, the iPhone (it could also use the iPhone's touch screen, which would help straightaway by removing that clunky keyboard). The Reader looks much cleaner, and that's good--we shouldn't be distracted by the package, the reading experience should be all about the words, and every other distraction should simply vanish. Accidentally hitting the Next Page button a hundred times is also a pretty bad thing.

And, as with the Reader, it's still too expensive. I'd be willing to spend about $100 on a "reading device," but $400 is way beyond the pale. Particularly when you're not saving that much on the books themselves. It would be even nicer if you could get a bundle discount on the books--buy it in print and for the Kindle, and get a special price for both. That would be nifty.

Still--in his video promo for the Kindle, Neil Gaiman talks about how, when he traveled to Florida to write American Gods, he had to drive rather than fly, because of the hundred pounds of reference books he took with him. This sort of argument carries an awful lot of weight (sorry) with me, and makes the idea of a device of this sort that much more attractive.

But all in all: we're not there yet. We're getting tantalizingly close to a device that could actually bring a significant part of my much-loved library on the road with me, but we ain't quite there yet. Maybe in its second generation of the Kindle, Amazon can drop the price and pretty it up significantly. That might just make the crucial, final difference...