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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
In which I borrow an e-book and give up print for two weeks.
Mar 31, 2000 | A few years ago, when Salon relocated to a new office, the moving company gave everyone handouts indicating where on our furniture and office equipment we should place those color-coded stickers that tell the movers where to put each item in the new space. The handout featured little drawings of your basic office stuff -- desk, chair, filing cabinet -- and typewriter.
That last drawing made me laugh. We didn't have a single typewriter, of course, and neither did the last company I'd worked for, which wasn't a particularly high-tech outfit. But there was also something unsettling about it. When was the last time I had even seen a typewriter, let alone used one? And yet the typewriter was once an indispensable, even iconic tool in the writer's life. Somewhere in my peregrinations I'd managed to discard my old manual machine, then the electric one, without quite noticing their passing. Somehow the typewriter had become virtually extinct, passenger-pigeon style, while most us weren't looking.
Changes in the ubiquitous technologies of our everyday life seem to work that way -- that is, sneakily. The revolutions that experts predict, on the other hand, usually don't pan out. Visualizations from the 1950s of life in the year 2000 tend to include meals-in-a-pill, robot maids and individual hovercars instead of automobiles. Those gizmos haven't materialized yet, but Post-its, fax machines and the Internet -- unimagined by the creators of George Jetson -- have.
So when I heard that consultant Hugh Look, speaking in London on March 22 at a seminar called "The Book Trade in 2010" as part of the second annual Internet Librarian International conference, had predicted that "reading material in book form" will soon be replaced by e-books, I was skeptical. After all, I'm still waiting for my own personal hovercraft.
If printed books will be replaced in the next 10 years, then what, exactly, will replace them? I'm open to the idea that the p-book can be supplanted, but the alternative, the e-book, remains pretty theoretical in the minds of most avid readers. Ask people to imagine a future in which print books have been usurped, without at the same time providing them with a clear image of the new, improved substitute, and you're asking them to visualize a beloved and enriching pleasure supplanted by -- nothing. No wonder it scares them.
So I called up NuvoMedia (a partner of Salon's) and asked them to lend me one of their Rocket eBooks for a couple of weeks. I'd endeavor to do as much of my daily reading as possible on the device, and I'd take it (almost) everywhere I take the printed books and other publications I read. If the demise of the p-book is going to leave a hole in my life, I want to know if the e-book can fill it.
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The arrival of my e-book device (which, for the sake of brevity, I'll just call the e-book, at the risk of its being confused with the digital files that are also called e-books) is an occasion of some excitement at Salon's New York office, which is more than you can say for the arrival of bushels of p-books from publishers every day.
Now's the time to explain that my relationship to books isn't quite like that of the average reader. As an editor of and reviewer for Salon Books, I get sent at least a dozen books -- many of them "galley proofs," uncorrected advance copies of forthcoming titles -- every day. To most book lovers this probably sounds like heaven, but there's nothing like editing a book section to make you realize how much crap gets published. And 300 pages of dreck takes up just as much shelf space -- always at a premium in our office -- as 300 pages of genius; of course, the supply of dreck is far more copious. Once unwanted books are in our office, we've got to find a way to get them out again (those suckers are heavy), and even the keepers occupy a lot of room.
So if only for this reason, I'm disposed to like e-books. The paperback-sized reading device in my hand, the Rocket eBook Pro, holds up to 40 book-length texts, according to the e-manual that comes pre-installed in it. It weighs about the same as the average hardcover, but its left side is thicker and heavier than its right: It swells out into a curved ridge where the spine of a p-book would be. This asymmetry turns out to be one of the most pleasing aspects of the object's design and something that several people comment on when I hand it to them. The e-book nestles naturally in my left hand while I'm reading it, and the ridge makes it easy to carry around without worrying about accidentally dropping it. "Some market research went into this," one acquaintance said as he weighed the device appreciatively.
However, before I can actually use the e-book to read anything more that the pre-installed content (a dictionary, a user's manual and "Alice in Wonderland"), I've got to connect its cradle to my iMac and get the software that enables me to download texts from the Web to work properly. There are the usual delays; it's hard to buy any computer hardware these days without realizing at the moment of consummation that you don't have the right cable or driver, a disappointment that's a lot like being on the verge of sex and discovering you've got no birth control. The hassles are nothing egregious to someone who's not daunted by the technology to begin with, but I suspect that more inexperienced users might be stymied by them.
