Current shortcomings of ebooks

I mentioned in a previous post that I am only interested in the content of a book, not the physical delivery vehicle. Elsewhere on the internet someone dismissed me as a philistine for saying so, calling my view scientific and utilitarian in contrast to her own “poetic” view! I’m tempted to defend myself like Warren Beatty did, in the famous monologue from the film McCabe and Mrs Miller:

I’ve got poetry in me. I ain’t going to put it down on paper.I ain’t no educated man. I got sense enough not to try it. I can’t never say nothing to you. If you’d just one time let me run the show, I’d….  You’re just freezing my soul, that’s what you’re doing. Freezing my soul.

Freezing my soul, I say! Well, not really, but misunderstanding my point, for which I take responsibility. Which is not to say that those who love physical books will like my true point any better, but I’d prefer to be dismissed for what I actually think, and so I will try to clarify.

Physical books have existed in many forms over the years. Scroll and codices, hand-copied and typeset, leatherbound and cardboard bound and paperbound, with pages of parchment and linen and wood pulp, meticulously produced with a hand press and spewed out of high-speed mechanical presses. I can imagine that at least some of these are craftsmanlike and can be appreciated for their physical properties. But I suspect that hardly any of us own books like that, or could afford to.

Physical books can also have certain intangible attributes whose value I won’t deny. If someone handed me a mass produced book that had been owned by Neil Postman or Wendell Berry or my grandfather, or if a friend had given me a book he wanted me to read, I would think of it differently than an identical copy I had purchased at a bookstore. Sentimental value is still value. But I own very few books like that, and I would think that for folks with extensive libraries very few of the books in them have such value.

I once was an avid reader of a particular subgenre of science fiction, the “new wave” of the 60s and early 70s. At one point I probably owned a thousand or so titles from the era. Those books meant a lot to me, and even though I wasn’t planning to read them again I had a vague notion that I would pass them on as a legacy to my kids. But about twenty years ago I changed my mind and tossed out all but a few. Why? For one thing, I no longer thought such writing was suitable for young readers. More important, though, I realized that passing along the books wasn’t an effective way of passing along what they meant to me. Better to talk with my kids about what I had learned, and then give them the opportunity to chart their own memorable path through the literary landscape, unhindered by any expectations of mine.

I noticed that my attitude towards physical had changed when one day as I was reading Harold Bloom’s The American Religion I came across a passage that led me to toss it (gently) across the room into a wastebasket. Bloom’s book was badly researched and quite misleading, so trashing my copy gave me great pleasure. I’ve told other people about that, and some have reacted with horror: throw a book in the trash? But I had only just purchased it from Half Price Books in Austin TX for $3.98, where it sat in a stack with forty other copies. Trashing my copy did not deny anyone the possibility of reading Bloom’s book. And trashing it was a recognition that what I held in my hands was not Bloom’s book at all but a physical delivery vehicle for the book. It wasn’t especially well printed, the dust jacket was minimally designed, the hardcover nondescript, the typeface unremarkable. And it was exactly like all the other physical copies, of which the publisher had printed so many that most of them were now gathering dust in used bookstores around the country, never to be opened before the booksellers finally got around to trashing them.

So I am not attached to physical books as aesthetic objects, since the ones I can afford are not aesthetically pleasing and not intended to be. But I do appreciate many of the functional qualities of a printed book. Through years of practice I have become very good at finding a passage in a codex. I’m not much for marginalia, but I do like to underline passages as I read and I find that a helpful aid to locating important things in books I’ve read. I like flipping through a book. I like reading by light reflected of a page. I like being able to lend a physical object.

These are all areas where ebooks currently fall short. But none of them are essential qualities of paper books, they are only things that paper books make convenient. As ebook readers evolve they may eventually be able to do some or all of those things, perhaps even better than a paper book. I don’t like making notes with my Kindle. But I do like highlighting passages, since the Kindle draws straighter lines than I do. And I consider it a major improvement that my Kindle can show me a list of all the highlights I’ve made in a book, and take me to a particular one when I click on it. I also consider the ability to search for text in an ebook to be an improvement over paper on a par with the improvement that codices made over scrolls when someone thought to number the pages of the codex. I expect in the near future to be able to do useful things I never before imagined.

Ebooks are young, and they are fragile in ways that would keep me from relying heavily on them for now. Lending them is not always easy. Managing a library can be difficult. Knowing that an ebook you’ve bought will always be available to you is not a certain thing yet. But I think these shortcomings are growing pains, not essential limitations of the new medium. For example, someone will eventually figure out a collection of procedures and mechanisms for building and preserving a library of ebooks that will give me the reassurance I need that my books will always be available to me. From then on I won’t worry about their sudden disappearance any more than I worry about a fire obliterating the UK library—it could happen, but the possibility is remote enough that I am happy to let UK warehouse the obscure, costly, and rare portion of my “collection.”

So, to summarize. I agree that paper books can have valuable aesthetic qualities, but I don’t think these are what print lovers refer to when they romanticize books. I also agree that the experience of reading a physical book differs in many ways from reading an ebook, but I see that as the result of specific shortcomings that those who design ebook devices will overcome as they become more widespread and heavily used. My one divisive claim is that the essence of a book is the words it contains, words that can be delivered in many different ways without diminishing its essence. And I think that my extensive library of physical books backs me up, filled as it is with cheap, badly printed, decaying, smelly, unattractive copies of the best that has ever been thought and said. I am grateful for the money-grubbing publishers who tried to make a few bucks by putting those words in print. But if an ebook reader gives me easier, cheaper, more consistently readable, more flexible, and broader access to the written word, then that’s where I’m headed.