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In “Loggerheads,” his piece for the December 7, 2009, New Yorker, David Sedaris writes admiringly of a family he describes: “Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.”
“Words still warm from being read” — what a wonderful image! I can conjure that from “real hardcover books,” and yet it eludes me when it comes to reading on an electronic device, whether this computer or one of any number of recently released handhelds. Kindles, Sony E-Readers, iPods — you name them. The latest one brought to my attention is called eDGe, whose dual screens open like a book with one side to display text and the other full-color images. It’s being touted as the brightest and best for the textbooks of tomorrow. Maybe it is. And maybe, for the sake of economy in a world where textbooks can cost a mint and weigh a ton, it is needed for economic and utilitarian reasons.
But none of these electronic devices, as yet, can compete on an aesthetic level with a “real hardcover book” — or even a good trade paperback — when it comes to look, feel, and readability. Try reading a book on a iPod Touch, for example. The eccentric word spacing alone, because it’s cheap just to slap already printed text into electronic form, is enough to drive anyone with an ounce of visual aesthetic bonkers.
As books migrate to the electronic world, so do bookstores. Recently I went for the last time to OutWord Bound Books, the only gay bookstore in Indianapolis, which is now closing. The shuttering of any independent bookstore is cause for lamentation in this age of corporate mega-stores. But even Barnes & Nobles and Borders are struggling against the online giant Amazon.
Part of the loss in any bookstore closing is that buyers are deprived of browsing rights — touching, feeling, mentally tasting those warm-from-reading words. Even with all its electronic bells and whistles, Amazon’s and other online booksellers’ websites ultimately are mere catalogs. Fancy technological catalogs to be sure, but viewing them is nothing like browsing real books in a real bookstore.
The loss of a gay bookstore is even more heartbreaking. In a mega-store, what passes for diversity often is only a shelf or a little more worth of gay or lesbian books — fiction, nonfiction, what have you, often all jumbled together — but nothing remotely approaching the scope of an entire store, however un-mega. And what about books from small independent or specialty publishers? Try finding those in any mega-store.
Gay bookstores always have been few and far between. Now, with the closing of OutWord Bound, not only has the population of Indianapolis gay, lesbian, or simply interested straight readers lost a significant resource. The loss extends to the whole of central Indiana.
Technology, whether online bookstores and e-reading devices, simply cannot replace the experience of real bookstores and real books with “words still warm from being read.”
Thank you for the wonderful post, Donovan. As a book collector and bibliophile - or to use a term from a book by Nicholas Basbanes which is more fitting - bibliomaniac, I have stood rigid against the introduction of an e-reader into my life. As you said, the addition of the touch and feel of the book adds to the reading experience. With some of the oldest volumes in my collection, I often like to wonder whose hands held them before mine - and in some cases, I know. None of this can be felt with an e-reader. In addition to the detriment to bookstores that you mentioned, e-readers also have begun to raise questions within the world of the authors themselves. Just the other day I was speaking with gay fiction author Eric Arvin and he was mentioning that he had come across digital copies of his book available online for free. He had no knowledge of these, and of course, he was receiving no royalties. While having free digital copies of books long out-of-print available is one thing, this is certainly a whole different ball of wax. Authors, many of whom barely make a living from sales, should not be subjected to having their books pirated because of free roaming digital copies. So...are digital copies for e-readers a good thing? Maybe, maybe not.
ReplyDeleteAnthony E.
I write and edit on a computer, but I can't warm up to doing serious or pleasurable reading on a screen. I like books. Should some books be available in electronic form? Absolutely. But there's a huge debate raging right now about how to protect author's rights and who really owns the rights to electronic versions of books once or still published in traditional forms.
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