Guest blog entry: Kindle, Pro and Con
Posted: October 5th, 2010, 11:40 am
The Kindle e-reader from Amazon is a paradoxical little toy.
Much of what’s good about it is also bad, and vice versa. On the one hand, it strips all ancillary aesthetic pleasure from the act of reading: no interesting fonts, no creamy paper, no leather bindings, no illustrations, no musty old summer house smell. You get nothing but text, drab and unadorned text, in some unlovely font (I think it’s Arial), exactly filling the same white rectangle in exactly the same way, page after page, book after the book, whether you’re reading Tolstoy, Lee Child or Robert Caro’s LBJ biography. But that’s also kind of cool. It gives all those books, all those writers, a level playing field. There’s nothing to distract you from the words themselves, which are after all, the whole point. You don’t even have to turn the pages – just push the edge of the reader, and one page melts into the next.
The Kindle is an isolating experience – kind of like the iPod. No one knows what you’re reading, no one is going to note the dust jacket and start a conversation. For the moment the Kindle itself sparks some interest, but that novelty will soon fade. But there’s a plus side to this, too. You can read War and Peace without making a statement about yourself: “Look at me! Reading the classics!” And if you have a weakness for cheesy romance novels or slow-witted techo-thrillers, no one has to know that either.
Isolation also means privacy.
The Kindle defies the hoarder in you, the part that wants to gloat over your sagging floor-to-ceiling bookshelves; but it sparks the hoarder in you also, as you scroll through the dozens of books –or is it hundreds now? – stored on your grey military-looking wafer of plastic.
At first it seems a cheerless, utilitarian item, but its allure creeps up on you. It’s not a book – OK. But in fact it’s more than a book, it’s all the books, any book, thousands of books, more and more of them, all the time. Want a book? Download it and you’ve got it, nestled in with the Jhumpa Lahiris and the Jonathan Franzens, instantly. Or pre-order books that haven’t even come out, and forget about them, and watch them appear on the screen when their appointed day arrives …at roughly one third the price of a hard-cover. It’s like magic … as close as we’re likely to come to real magic in our muddling, mundane world.
The companionable presence of accumulating books disappears; but so does the infernal clutter of them. I love Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, Lee Child and Robert Crais (the four writers currently on my pre-order queue), but do I really need copies of their old books -- which, let’s face it, I’ll probably never read again -- gathering like barnacles on the hull of my leaking and barely sea-worthy existence? No. The real endangered species here is the mass-market paperback, the airport quick-read, super-market impulse buy. They’re going down, and it’s just as well – they’re a waste of paper not to mention all the resources it takes to print, deliver and, ultimately, pulp them. Good riddance.
The navigation tools on the Kindle are irksome – but delightful. You can highlight passages and they remain saved in a separate file; you can look up any word, locate any reference you may have forgotten (“We had so much fun at the Chandler’s party” The what? No idea what she’s talking about? Just type in ‘chandler’s party’ and the Kindle will show you every place in the book where the words appear). This will be especially good for reading Russian novels with their confusing welter of names and nicknames and patronymics.
Another annoyance: the Kindle has no page numbers. But this is tied to another excellent feature of the device: different sized fonts. When you’re tired you can make the letters extra big, and go back to non-geriatric scale when you’re wide awake and reading in the morning. And there’s another advantage. Though at first it’s a tad disorienting not to know precisely where you are in a book (A bar at the bottom of the screen does tell you the percentage of the book you’ve read), it’s also kind of liberating. Simply not being able to leaf ahead to see how many more pages in a given section or chapter (or story, if you’re reading something like Unaccustomed Earth, as I am now) winds up eliminating another distraction and drawing you deeper into the narrative. Endings are more surprising, conclusions more conclusive this way: you absorb a blow more completely if you’re not braced for it.
All the talk about the Kindle is foolishly binary: will it replace books? There’s no need for the Kindle to replace books; I can imagine having copies of a beloved volume in many formats – I already own tatty paperbacks and pristine first editions of some novels – why not add a Kindle version that I can read without having the pages fall out of one, or ruining the value of the other? But then I wonder. That blank little rectangle with its blocky Arial printing has become alarmingly addictive, bizarrely comforting, insidiously essential. And it’s so light! The massive LBJ biography weighs no more than a pamphlet; and I can make Caro’s diabolical micro-text any size I want.
I ordered the new Stephen McCauley novel and that book about Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Carole King from my local book store, but I don’t know. Do I really want to lug them around, or add them to the teetering piles on my chairs and tables? I think I’ll just download them onto the Kindle, and maybe a couple of other ones, also. I just wish more of them were available as e-books; and it would be nice to read them in Garamond or Palatino. But that's okay --I'm happy to wait.
I have a book with me.
Much of what’s good about it is also bad, and vice versa. On the one hand, it strips all ancillary aesthetic pleasure from the act of reading: no interesting fonts, no creamy paper, no leather bindings, no illustrations, no musty old summer house smell. You get nothing but text, drab and unadorned text, in some unlovely font (I think it’s Arial), exactly filling the same white rectangle in exactly the same way, page after page, book after the book, whether you’re reading Tolstoy, Lee Child or Robert Caro’s LBJ biography. But that’s also kind of cool. It gives all those books, all those writers, a level playing field. There’s nothing to distract you from the words themselves, which are after all, the whole point. You don’t even have to turn the pages – just push the edge of the reader, and one page melts into the next.
The Kindle is an isolating experience – kind of like the iPod. No one knows what you’re reading, no one is going to note the dust jacket and start a conversation. For the moment the Kindle itself sparks some interest, but that novelty will soon fade. But there’s a plus side to this, too. You can read War and Peace without making a statement about yourself: “Look at me! Reading the classics!” And if you have a weakness for cheesy romance novels or slow-witted techo-thrillers, no one has to know that either.
Isolation also means privacy.
The Kindle defies the hoarder in you, the part that wants to gloat over your sagging floor-to-ceiling bookshelves; but it sparks the hoarder in you also, as you scroll through the dozens of books –or is it hundreds now? – stored on your grey military-looking wafer of plastic.
At first it seems a cheerless, utilitarian item, but its allure creeps up on you. It’s not a book – OK. But in fact it’s more than a book, it’s all the books, any book, thousands of books, more and more of them, all the time. Want a book? Download it and you’ve got it, nestled in with the Jhumpa Lahiris and the Jonathan Franzens, instantly. Or pre-order books that haven’t even come out, and forget about them, and watch them appear on the screen when their appointed day arrives …at roughly one third the price of a hard-cover. It’s like magic … as close as we’re likely to come to real magic in our muddling, mundane world.
The companionable presence of accumulating books disappears; but so does the infernal clutter of them. I love Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, Lee Child and Robert Crais (the four writers currently on my pre-order queue), but do I really need copies of their old books -- which, let’s face it, I’ll probably never read again -- gathering like barnacles on the hull of my leaking and barely sea-worthy existence? No. The real endangered species here is the mass-market paperback, the airport quick-read, super-market impulse buy. They’re going down, and it’s just as well – they’re a waste of paper not to mention all the resources it takes to print, deliver and, ultimately, pulp them. Good riddance.
The navigation tools on the Kindle are irksome – but delightful. You can highlight passages and they remain saved in a separate file; you can look up any word, locate any reference you may have forgotten (“We had so much fun at the Chandler’s party” The what? No idea what she’s talking about? Just type in ‘chandler’s party’ and the Kindle will show you every place in the book where the words appear). This will be especially good for reading Russian novels with their confusing welter of names and nicknames and patronymics.
Another annoyance: the Kindle has no page numbers. But this is tied to another excellent feature of the device: different sized fonts. When you’re tired you can make the letters extra big, and go back to non-geriatric scale when you’re wide awake and reading in the morning. And there’s another advantage. Though at first it’s a tad disorienting not to know precisely where you are in a book (A bar at the bottom of the screen does tell you the percentage of the book you’ve read), it’s also kind of liberating. Simply not being able to leaf ahead to see how many more pages in a given section or chapter (or story, if you’re reading something like Unaccustomed Earth, as I am now) winds up eliminating another distraction and drawing you deeper into the narrative. Endings are more surprising, conclusions more conclusive this way: you absorb a blow more completely if you’re not braced for it.
All the talk about the Kindle is foolishly binary: will it replace books? There’s no need for the Kindle to replace books; I can imagine having copies of a beloved volume in many formats – I already own tatty paperbacks and pristine first editions of some novels – why not add a Kindle version that I can read without having the pages fall out of one, or ruining the value of the other? But then I wonder. That blank little rectangle with its blocky Arial printing has become alarmingly addictive, bizarrely comforting, insidiously essential. And it’s so light! The massive LBJ biography weighs no more than a pamphlet; and I can make Caro’s diabolical micro-text any size I want.
I ordered the new Stephen McCauley novel and that book about Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Carole King from my local book store, but I don’t know. Do I really want to lug them around, or add them to the teetering piles on my chairs and tables? I think I’ll just download them onto the Kindle, and maybe a couple of other ones, also. I just wish more of them were available as e-books; and it would be nice to read them in Garamond or Palatino. But that's okay --I'm happy to wait.
I have a book with me.