Is the Kindle the Blank Slate of the Future?
My mother wants me to get a Kindle.
“A guy had one on the boat,” she gushes, referencing her recent cruise. “You can get everything on them. Before long, even you will be on Kindle.”
Me, on Kindle. It is, I suppose, better than being used for kindling, although somehow I suspect the results will be similar.
Kindle is Amazon’s voguish e-book reader, as slender as a magazine and as light as a paperback. No need to lug around those door-stopping Truman biographies. With a few clicks, users can download as many as 1,500 books on to Kindle’s 3Gs of library space.
Kindle boasts a selection of 350,000 books, along with dozens of newspapers and magazines. “Our vision for kindle,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said, “is to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds.”
That the Kindle looks like a high-tech version of a school child’s chalk slates is only one of its ironies. The book-delivery device may end by slaying books altogether. The Association of American Publishers estimates that hardcover sales have dipped 13 percent in 2008 and have dipped 15.3 percent since July. Sales of E-books, on the other hand, though hardly robust, are increasing, 1.6 of total book sales, according to The New York Times.
Many avid readers feel an almost reflexive revulsion at the thought of reading a book on a computer screen. These are the same Luddites that like to hold a newspaper – imagine! — rather than scroll through on-line text. But beyond the knee-jerk rebuff of anything new, there are real concerns about the proliferation of e-books. Chief among them is piracy.
If you think the music industry is battered by the Napster-ized, iTuned, CD-burning venial theft that goes on hundreds of times daily, consider the poor publishing industry. Sales are stagnant; Harry Potter is gone; Dan Brown is nowhere near is profitable excoriating the masons as he is crucifying the Catholics, and the only savior on the horizon is Sarah Palin, a woman notorious for being unable to name a book she’d read.
What publishing doesn’t need is the you-share-mine-I’ll-share-yours intellectual rip-off of e-book piracy. It does not exactly warm the cockles of one’s heart to learn that one of the leading Silicon Valley digital publishing startups is called “Smashwords.”
Ah, progress.
But there are other reasons to view the emergence of e-books with circumspection. What will happen to the sensual pleasure of embracing a book with your hands? Where will the clean, pulpy scent that wafts from a book’s creases go? And what of the strange, vaguely erotic sensation of turning the yellowed pages of a used book, its pages smudged by the oily fingerprint of a stranger, its passages underlined by an earlier reader who found this excerpt meaningful – and why that one?
I have always been a book snooper, by which I mean that whenever I am in a home for the first time, I gravitate to the bookshelves. Some people scrutinize the furniture; others the art. But to me, nothing is as riveting or revealing as a book case. A bookcase so represents the soul that even our closest friends can be surprised by what they discover about us there.
A bookcase is the most intimate piece of furniture we own.
Nothing really starts a conversation — by which I mean real conversation — like a collection of book spines. Organize them by height, or by author, or by subject or color, or simply squeeze them, slapdash, wherever they’ll fit. I visited a couple with bookcases so considered and precise that they began with Andrews and ended with Zola. I interviewed a man who laid his books cheek-by-jowl under his mattress to form a box spring. Book spines glitter like jeweled chips, each representing a journey. I love the mosaic of their spines, spliced together like shards of memory.
The man who became my husband had no chest of drawers and no television, but had scores of cheap, pressed-wood folding bookcases that ringed his living room like chain mail. In the bedroom, the shelves were jury-rigged and precarious but the books were beautiful – Everyman editions you could hold in the palm of your hand and Library of America volumes he had wrapped in thick cellophane paper. When he pulled out a Austen’s “Emma,” holding it as gently as a kitten, I knew I was sunk.
When I am feeling nostalgic, I weed through my own bookcases, so much more bloated and nicked than when I first bought them. I dust off a paperback or two and turn to the inside, where I always date a book when I finish it. I remember where I was when I read the book, geographically and emotionally. I remember the feeling I had when I held the book in my hand, turning its pages, staining the jacket with tea and the pages with hand cream. The book became a part of me, and if its power is not as vital to me now as it once was, the memory of its effect lingers.
I would have so much less dust with the Kindle, and so much more room for other, less space-hogging, indulgences.
But a Kindle is merely a blank slate. And while I, too, may have started out as one, it is not the way I want to end up.