Bibliophibians and kindling

MANILA, Philippines – Bibliophibians — those of us who live partly in the world and partly in books are divided on the issue of e-books, those handheld gadgets which allow you to read entire books on their screens. The usual bibliophibian argument against e-books, apart from the fact that they’re hard on the eyes, is that they do not give you the full experience of reading.

There are two main components to the reading experience: the book as a physical object, and the book as a portal that transports you to another place and time. There’s your physical relationship to the book, and your mental relationship to the words.

The argument against e-books has to do mostly with the physical part. With a book, you hold the entire text in your hands so you get a sense of the whole. You feel the weight of the printed matter, you smell the ink and paper, and you flip through the pages with ease. It is, how shall I put this, sexier. With an e-book, the whole is broken down into accessible bits: you only see a portion of text at a time. You’re holding cold, lifeless plastic and metal. You don’t flip the pages, you scroll down. We won’t even start on what your library would look like.

Global recession and the dire financial picture for the American book publishing industry have led bibliophibians to take a more pragmatic view of the e-book. It may not replicate the total experience of reading a book, but it’s still reading. The important thing is that people still read. This means delivering books to the audience in the quickest and most convenient way possible, and we have to admit that the Kindle 2 does that.

Produced by Amazon.com, the Kindle 2 is a device eight inches long, five inches wide, and the thickness of a magazine. It weighs about the same as a paperback novel (detective, not Dostoyevsky). The screen looks like paper; the gray can be adjusted to suit your eyes. To turn the page, you push the buttons on either side. It holds 1,500 books. You can download books right on it; no need to connect to a computer. New books in Kindle editions usually cost $9.99. The gadget has a text-to-speech feature so it can read books out loud to you.

Recently my fellow bibliophibian Scrat listened to Darth Vader’s voice in his head saying “Come over to the Dark Side” and got himself a Kindle 2. As he is the only Kindle user I know, I asked him how he chooses which books to get in Kindle editions and which to get in hard copy. He thought it over for some days, then e-mailed this reply:

“I have no specific plan on downloads but to just go for it as articles and books appear. I have been using it more extensively to download my foreign newspapers daily and I have started on books. On the book front, I have used it mainly for non-fiction works which tend to be fatter, bulkier, and in my case more sporadically-read. Nice to turn to a chapter when one feels like it. Bottom line, the quality is excellent and these days my eyes aren’t getting any better so the font size adjustment is useful.

“I think it really has a future. Without sounding overly pragmatic, think about what could be saved in paper, shipment and inventory. It is not the same experience as reading a book, obviously, but an interesting use of technology. There is also this handy feature where you can e-mail long articles for free to a web site which then translates them into Kindle format.

“Finally, just a hunch: I bet Apple will come out with their own reader. They already have Kindle apps for iPhone and iTouch.”

When Apple produces a reader I’ll probably want one.

One may argue that e-books like the Kindle are in keeping with the natural development of reading matter. In his delightful and comprehensive book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel notes that “From the very beginning, readers demanded books in formats adapted to their intended use.” The Mesopotamians used square or oblong clay tablets three inches across, small enough to be held in one hand. Several tablets would make up one book; they were kept in pouches or boxes so the reader could pick them up in the right order.

Later came papyrus scrolls, which were unwieldy and impractical. Imagine having to unroll a novel as you read it — losing your place would be hellish. Scrolls were superseded by the codex, a roll of parchment folded into pages. By the year 400 AD, books were produced as gathered pages in a rectangular format. “Folded once, the parchment became a folio; folded twice, a quarto; folded once again, an octavo.” And then Johann Gutenberg invented printing, and here we are.

“It is interesting to note how often a technological development promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede, making us aware of old-fashioned virtues we might otherwise have either overlooked or dismissed as of negligible importance.”

Manguel was referring to the fact that digital technology had not affected the production and sale of books in the old-fashioned codex form. He was writing in 1996, but I hope he’s still right.

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Some weeks ago we featured Moleskinerie.com, the Moleskine fan site. Moleskinerie invited readers to submit their designs for a limited edition 5th Anniversary notebook. The winning designs came from Northern Ireland, Belgium, and the Philippines.

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