Cereal Monogamist

It Doesn't Kindle My Desire

Sorry for the pun. It's late!

There’s been a Kindle-themed controversy in the news this week. You can read here for the complete story and here for a pretty shrewd prediction of the fallout Amazon can expect to experience; if you want my concise summary, here it is. Basically, two classic books by George Orwell which were purchased by Kindle readers were deleted from the readers’ systems when the publisher decided against making them electronically available. Money was refunded, but the situation has reminded consumers of the difference between purchasing a physical product and purchasing electronic data from a public network. It would be the equivalent of me waking up to discover all the Jane Austen books had been removed from my shelves over night, with a ten-dollar bill in the place of each. (Ten and a five for those fancy Broadview editions.)

It’s an interesting situation, and I think it’s a good thing that it came up; now policies can be developed and instated that will protect the consumer from this kind of ambiguity of possession (or, that will protect the producer/publisher from this kind of thing and sink the product, as the second link shows).

In the meantime, I am contentedly avoiding electronic books. It’s hard to explain what doesn’t interest me about the Kindle without sounding like Andy Rooney, but I can give it a shot.

I’m used to the tactile experience of holding a physical book in my hands, and turning pages. The Kindle is attractively small and light (so I hear; I’ve never seen one in person), but I expect there are elements of the reading experience I would miss—for example, the feeling of progress I get when I can see that I have read more than halfway through the book and will most likely finish it. If I get in bed and notice that my bedtable book has got just a small sliver of pages left to be read, I might pick it up that night when I wouldn’t dream of picking up a Kindle. For purely sentimental reasons, I would miss the smooth, glossy covers, the heft of the pages, and the springiness of the binding. (You will find I am not one of those people who fetishize the smell of books. In fact, I prefer my books to have no odor at all.)

Another factor is that I keep books. I can see the extreme benefit of consuming newspapers and magazines via the Kindle; getting a full newspaper delivered every day generates a lot of paper and a lot of clutter. I always hate throwing away magazines, too, because they cost so much, whether I subscribe to them or pay the newsstand price. But if you keep them, they pile up overwhelmingly. That’s why on TV those weird shut-in characters always have piles of newspapers built into forts around their furniture. I had an entire trunkful of old New Yorkers until my boyfriend made me throw them all away.

Some people don’t keep books, either—that’s why you’ve got programs like PaperBack Swap and Swaptree and Book Mooch and Title Trader, not to mention eBay, used bookstores and libraries. But I do. My book shelves have grown more and more packed—and that’s a huge commitment, considering how many times we’ve moved in the past few years—and they give me a sense of accomplishment when I look at them. I think, "I’ve read that, and that, and that. Oh, and I haven’t read that yet; I’ll get around to it sooner or later."

Another benefit of the Kindle is that it can hold multiple books at a time. I do tend to be in the middle of more than one book at a time, but I don’t need to be offered my pick of any of them at any time. I read different books on different occasions (this one is the bedside book, this one is in the afternoons, this one I only read in the library, etc.). Also, sometimes I am more likely to finish a book when it’s the only book available to me at a given moment. There have been times when I’ve read from a book I’m only lukewarm about when the book I really want to read is in the next room, all because I’m too lazy to get up and get the good one. And I have to embrace any limitations of access which end up having a positive motivational effect on me.

This may all become moot in a year; I hear some colleges are going to begin equipping their students with Kindles instead of requiring physical textbooks. Case is among them.

But for now I'm pretty happy with my paperbacks.