The book world is once again abuzz over the latest innovation in digital download technology known as the Kindle Book or Kindle 2, its arrival and Amazon’s head Jeff Bezos’ aggressive attempts to strongarm the publishing industry.
As an independent book publisher I am grappling with the dilemna surrounding Kindle and its ilk—ebooks digital downloads, etc. Certainly I can see their uses for storage of large amounts of material for research and mass consumption of text. An agent in New York totes one for just this purpose: it’s easier on the shoulders than lugging all those manuscripts home on the subway every night. And a friend pointed out that it minimizes one’s luggage and hassle with extra weight at the airport. Deciding which books to bring and where they go in my luggage—whether suitcase or carry-on—or jacket pocket is an important aspect of packing, I’ve always felt.
But, regardless of how handy, convenient, streamlined or “user-friendly” the new Kindle purports to be, the fact that it is very expensive to produce, that the downloaded books are priced unfairly low compared to current real book prices, and the fact that it puts independent publishers and booksellers in a financial and ethical bind is really the point.
Granted, I am at this moment looking into ways to adapt my books for digital download, but I resent that this is something that is all of a sudden being so de rigueur as to be almost compulsory for a publisher. Given that sales of this gadget make up only 1%-3% of the total market, according to recent industry reports, how necessary is it? Are we just being hornswoggled into another brand-name marketing gambit by Amazon which in another decade would have been IBM, Microsoft or Xerox? Is Kindle just another Swindle?
Regardless, of marketing and financial concerns, I have several personal and asthetic concerns about this gizmo of the month. And, since we’ve had enough people getting in line to extoll the virtues of the Kindle and all the wonderful things it can do, I thought it useful to list a few things it can’t do, or that you can’t do with it. So, below, I give you ten things you can’t do with a Kindle.
1) Yes, you can take a Kindle to the beach; but can you take it to the bath? If you drop a book in the water, you fish it out and put it on the shelf to dry. The ink may run and the pages might be a bit crinkly, but it’s still readable. And you have a good story to tell your friends about what happened to the book.
2) It may saves space in your luggage; but what are suitcases for then? You may be able to take it to exotic places, but can it take you away in your imagination the way a timeless tome can?
3) You can’t spill food or your favorite beverage on them. Some of my books retain the Proustian stains and aromas of bygone chinese meals and spaghetti eaten while simultaneously consuming the words of a beloved author.
4) Kindles don’t smell. There’s nothing like the smell of a newly printed book, or an old musty book either.
5) Kindles have none of the tactile memory sensation that a beloved book gives off—the feel of the pages, the well-worn spine, the cover especially. Kindles have no covers.
6) Kindles have no personality, no individuality, and evoke no memory of pleasurable and at times life-changing moments reading a particular book—you know where you were, what you were doing, who you were with, how old you were, what you were experiencing emotionally—all these fragments of your life that are reborn when you hold that book.
7) You can’t store little tidbits of notes, phone numbers, restaurant cards, movie ticket stubs, love letters, plane tickets or illicit substances in a Kindle. My brother once carved out a square hole within the pages of Mark TWain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” in order to conceal his stash. I heard recently how a group of young gentlemen traveling in the Caribbean were saved from arrest thanks to a book in hand that quickly became a hiding place for a joint during a police search.
8) Can you use a Kindle for a pillow? I have used paperback novels for pillows on occasion when sleeping in a bus or trainstation.
9) You can’t use a Kindle as a sunshade, or umbrella, or as a weapon. You can”t “throw the Kindle” at somebody, can you. Someone once threw a book at me. The spine hit me above the eye, and it hurt and left a mark—but I could still read the book.
10) You can’t autograph a Kindle.
Lastly, I leave you with these thoughts. Several years hence, when the book has gone the way of the polar bear and the rhinoceros, will its meaning have vanished as well? Surely the act of reading is more than just the consumption of information. Reading is a journey, an exploration, an adventure into the author’s mind and world. Will this experience still be the same when delivered on a black and white screen?
