Bookless public library...Bexar, Texas BiblioTech

"Texas library offers glimpse of bookless future"

by

Paul J. Weber

January 4th, 2014

USA TODAY

Texas has seen the future of the public library, and it looks a lot like an Apple Store: Rows of glossy iMacs beckon. iPads mounted on a tangerine-colored bar invite readers. And hundreds of other tablets stand ready for checkout to anyone with a borrowing card.

Even the librarians imitate Apple's dress code, wearing matching shirts and that standard-bearer of geek-chic, the hoodie. But this $2.3 million library might be most notable for what it does not have — any actual books.

That makes Bexar County's BiblioTech the nation's only bookless public library, a distinction that has attracted scores of digital bookworms, plus emissaries from as far away as Hong Kong who want to learn about the idea and possibly take it home.

"I told our people that you need to take a look at this. This is the future," said Mary Graham, vice president of South Carolina's Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce. "If you're going to be building new library facilities, this is what you need to be doing."

All-digital libraries have been on college campuses for years. But the county, which runs no other libraries, made history when it decided to open BiblioTech. It is the first bookless public library system in the country, according to information gathered by the American Library Association.

Similar proposals in other communities have been met with doubts. In California, the city of Newport Beach floated the concept of a bookless branch in 2011 until a backlash put stacks back in the plan. Nearly a decade earlier in Arizona, the Tucson-Pima library system opened an all-digital branch, but residents who said they wanted books ultimately got their way.

Graham toured BiblioTech in the fall and is pushing Charleston leaders for a bond measure in 2014 to fund a similar concept, right down to the same hip aesthetic reminiscent of Apple.

Except Apple Stores aren't usually found in parts of town like this. BiblioTech is on the city's economically depressed South Side and shares an old strip mall with a Bexar County government building. On a recent afternoon, one confused couple walked into the library looking for the justice of the peace.

San Antonio is the nation's seventh-largest city but ranks 60th in literacy, according to census figures. Back in the early 2000s, community leaders in Bibliotech's neighborhood of low-income apartments and thrift stores railed about not even having a nearby bookstore, said Laura Cole, BiblioTech's project coordinator. A decade later, Cole said, most families in the area still don't have Wi-Fi.

"How do you advance literacy with so few resources available?" she said.

Residents are taking advantage now. The library is on pace to surpass 100,000 visitors in its first year. Finding an open iMac among the four dozen at BiblioTech is often difficult after the nearby high school lets out, and about half of the facility's e-readers are checked out at any given time, each loaded with up to five books. One of BiblioTech's regulars is a man teaching himself Mandarin.

Head librarian Ashley Elkholf came from a traditional Wisconsin high school library and recalled the scourges of her old job: misshelved items hopelessly lost in the stacks, pages thoughtlessly ripped out of books and items that went unreturned by patrons who were unfazed by measly fines and lax enforcement.

But in the nearly four months since BiblioTech opened, Elkholf has yet to lend out one of her pricey tablets and never see it again. The space is also more economical than traditional libraries despite the technology: BiblioTech purchases its 10,000-title digital collection for the same price as physical copies, but the county saved millions on architecture because the building's design didn't need to accommodate printed books.

"If you have bookshelves, you have to structure the building so it can hold all of that weight," Elkholf said. "Books are heavy, if you've ever had one fall on your foot."

Up the road in Austin, for example, the city is building a downtown library to open in 2016 at a cost of $120 million. Even a smaller traditional public library that recently opened in nearby suburban Kyle cost that city about $1 million more than BiblioTech.

On her first visit, 19-year-old Abigail Reyes was only looking for a quiet space to study for an algebra exam. But she got a quick tutorial from a librarian on how to search for digital books and check out tablets before plopping down on a row of sleek couches.

"I kind of miss the books," Reyes said. "I don't like being on the tablets and stuff like that. It hurts my eyes."

Across the room, Rosemary Caballeo tried shopping for health insurance on a set of computers reserved for enrollment in the Affordable Care Act. Her restless 2-year-old ran around and pawed at a row of keyboards. The little girl shrieked loudly, shattering the main room's quiet. She was soon whisked outside by her father.

After all, it's still a library.

Household robot MKS-4355's quest

A short story from Nautilus [May, 2013]

The Candle Burned

by

Mike Gelprin

Andrey Petrovich had given up all hope when the videophone rang.

“Hello, I saw your ad. You give private literature lessons?”

Andrey Petrovich peered at the man on the screen. He was about thirty, with an open smile and serious eyes, dressed in a suit and tie. Andrey Petrovich’s heart skipped a beat. Posting the ad on the Net had become but a hapless habit. In the past ten years he had received six responses. Three callers had dialed the wrong number, two others were old-fashioned insurance salesmen who still made phone calls, and the last one had confused literature with legislature.

“Y-yes, I d-do,” Andrey Petrovich stuttered anxiously. “In my apartment. You are interested in literature?”

“I am,” the man nodded from the screen, and introduced himself. “My name is Maksim. How much do you charge?”

Andrey Petrovich almost blurted, “it’s free,” but caught himself. “Rates are per hour. And negotiable.” He took a deep breath. “When would you like to start?”

“Well, I… you see,” Maksim started.

“First lesson is free,” Andrey Petrovich said quickly. “If you don’t like it, there’s no obligation.”

“Let’s start tomorrow then,” Maksim said definitively. “Are you free at ten in the morning? I drop the kids off at school by nine, and then I’m good until two.”

“I’m free,” Andrey Petrovich said happily. “Here’s my address. Got a pen?”

“I’ll remember it,” Maksim assured him. “Go ahead.”

Andrey Petrovich couldn’t sleep that night. Pacing from wall to wall in his tiny room, nearly a closet, he tried to tame his shaking hands and jumbled thoughts. For the past twelve years, he had been living on a meager subsistence, ever since the day he was fired. He had given up all hope of teaching.

“Your specialty is too narrow,” the principal of The Arts and Humanities Academy for the Gifted and Talented had told him during their last conversation. “You are an excellent pedagogue, but your subject has outlived itself. Children don’t study it anymore. Why don’t you retrain, take on something modern like virtual ethics or robotic torts legal code? Or as a last resort, the history of cinematography. It’s on its way out too, but it would carry you to retirement. The Academy would reimburse you for some of the cost. What do you say?”

Andrey Petrovich declined the offer, which he regretted later. There were no jobs in literature and philology, and former teachers were moving into other disciplines, grasping at any conceivable straws. For the first two years, he diligently went through liberal arts colleges and conservatories, but departments of humanities were disappearing and libraries were closing. When all proved fruitless, he tried to retrain, despite his aversion to the dry modern disciplines. When his wife left, he gave up.

As his savings dwindled, Andrey Petrovich spiraled into poverty. First, he sold his aircar, old yet still in good shape. Then he let go of the antique tea set, his mother’s memento. Furniture and clothes followed. And once he was left with nothing in his sad bachelor pad, it was the books’ turn. The real books—the old-fashioned, leather-bound tomes with original illustrations, still smelling of ink, paper, and glue. Collectors paid top price for the rare old volumes, so Leo Tolstoy brought food to his table for almost a month. Fyodor Dostoevsky lasted for two weeks. Ivan Bunin sufficed for about ten days. Every time Andrey Petrovich thought about his lost treasures, he felt like throwing up.

Finally, he was left with a few dozen of his absolutely favorite books, which he couldn’t sell even if faced with starving to death. Hemingway, Balzac, Zola, Pasternak and a few other authors huddled together on his four remaining shelves, and every day Andrey Petrovich lovingly dusted them.

“If the lessons work, I may be able to buy back Tolstoy,” he mumbled to himself, shuffling from wall to wall, anxiously waiting for the morning. “Or maybe Murakami. Or should I do Amado first?”

Suddenly, a realization struck him. It didn’t matter whether he could reclaim his books. What mattered was that he could pass on his knowledge of the long forgotten art: the beauty of the language, the flow of the story, the insights of its authors. He could impart, transfer, and transform.

Maksim rang his bell at 10 a.m. sharp.

“Please, have a seat.” Andrey Petrovich ushered him in. “What would you like to start with?”

Maksim awkwardly lowered himself into a chair.

“What do you think I should start with?” he asked—and blushed. “I have to confess, I’m a total ignoramus. No one ever taught me anything. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Oh, but of course I understand!” Andrey Petrovich burst out sympathetically. “No one taught anyone for generations. Literature has been an academic stepchild for more than a hundred years. It’s even been abandoned by schools with a humanitarian focus. It’s no longer offered anywhere.”

“Anywhere?” Maksim echoed.

“I’m pretty sure of it,” Andrey Petrovich replied with a sigh. “See, the crisis began at the end of the twentieth century. People had no time to read. First children had no time to read, then their kids really had no time to read, and so on, every generation worse than the one before. Interactive entertainment pushed out reading. Technology pushed out philology. Literature, history and geography couldn’t compete with cybernetics, quantum mechanics, and plasma physics. But literature was worst of all. It just fell by the wayside. Do you understand?”

Maksim nodded. “Yes, I do. Please continue!”

“In the twenty-first century electronic platforms took hold and publishers stopped printing paper books. Because people no longer read, the number of writers dwindled and eventually they went extinct. Writers stopped writing! The literary reserve built over twenty centuries of writing is still more than sufficient to teach literature, but no one cares anymore. We’re losing our history.”

Andrey Petrovich paused for a few seconds and wiped off his suddenly sweaty forehead.

“It’s so hard to talk about,” he finally uttered. “I understand that it was an inevitable process. Literature died because it didn’t fit into evolutionary progress. But it used to carry the wisdom of mankind to the next generation. It used to nourish souls and build spirits. It helped form the minds of children. Today, our children are raised emotionally and intellectually empty. They grow up soulless like machines. It’s horrible and it’s frightening!”

“That’s what I felt too.” Maksim nodded. “That’s why I came to you.”

“Do you have children?” asked Andrey Petrovich.

“Well…” Maksim stuttered. “Yes, two, a year apart. Pavlik and Anechka. I need the foundation. I’ll find and read the manuscripts on the Net. I just need to know what to read. And how to think about what I read. Will you teach me?”

“Yes,” Andrey Petrovich said, inspired. “I will and I shall.”

He stood up straight and spread his shoulders, suddenly growing taller and stronger as he filled his lungs with air. “Boris Pasternak, poetry,” he announced, fetching the dormant words from his memory.

“As blizzards whirled around the earth

And snow churned

A candle burned upon the table,

A candle burned…”

When the lesson was over, Andrey Petrovich asked, with a slight tremor in his voice, “Will you come tomorrow?”

“I sure will,” Maksim answered with determination. “The only thing is—you know, about the payment. I work as a secretary for a wealthy couple. I manage bookkeeping, I do shopping, I run errands. My salary is kind of low, but I can bring food, clothes, merchandise, and even some electronics—as payment. Would that work for you?”

Andrey Petrovich blushed. He felt so inspired after his first lesson, he would do it for free.

“Of course it works,” he said. “Thank you. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Literature is not only about the story, but also about how that story is spoken.” Andrey Petrovich was pacing around the room as he explained to Maksim the art of storytelling.

“The language is a wonderful and wondrous tool, and our talented ancestors had mastered it brilliantly. Just listen to the words, just listen!”

Maksim listened intently. He always looked as if he was trying to absorb and commit to memory every line Andrey Petrovich uttered. He had an almost uncanny ability to focus, and he never seemed tired or overwhelmed.

“Pushkin, ‘Eugene Onegin,’” Andrey Petrovich would announce the next poem, and then recite. When he was done, he would move onto another author. “Lermontov, ‘Demon.’ Vysotsky, ‘Capricious Horses.’ Have I tired you, Maksim?”

Maksim was never tired. He never lost his concentration either.

As weeks and months went by, Andrey Petrovich rejuvenated. He grew youthful and energetic. His life made sense again, it now had purpose and reason. After poetry they moved onto prose and fiction, which were more complex and time-consuming, but by then Maksim had developed into a terrific student with a keen intuition. Originally nearly tone-deaf to the beauty of the language, he warmed up to the rhyme and rhythm, the cadence and the harmony of words. He made leaps of progress every day as Andrey Petrovich ventured into Balzac, Hugo, Hemingway and Nabokov. Together, they went from classics to science fiction and from mysteries to fantasies, traveling through centuries, countries and empires— from Shakespeare to Remarque, from Maupassant to Fitzgerald, and from Mark Twain to Rabelais.

It was just another Wednesday morning when Maksim didn’t come. Andrey Petrovich waited anxiously. By the end of the day he was a nervous wreck. He tried to convince himself that his student had suddenly fallen ill, but his sixth sense told him otherwise. Punctual like a Swiss clock, Maksim wouldn’t miss a session without fair warning. In a year and a half he hadn’t been late once. He would’ve called. As a matter of fact, he would’ve called the night before!

When Maksim didn’t show up the next morning, Andrey Petrovich knew something bad had happened. He found Maksim’s number in his videophone history, poked the callback button, and gasped when he heard the cold metallic response.

“This number has been disconnected.”

The next few days were a blur. Even his favorite books didn’t save Andrey Petrovich from the swiftly resurrected feeling of uselessness, which now gnawed him with newfound strength. He considered calling hospitals and morgues, but didn’t know how to describe the person he sought after. Looking for a fellow named Maksim, thirtyish, sorry, no last name?

When he finally felt so stifled he could no longer breathe inside his chipping walls, Andrey Petrovich staggered outside.

“Hey there, Petrovich,” Nefedov, his neighbor from the floor below, greeted him on the stoop. “Good to see you again. Whatcha hiding for? It wasn’t your fault.”

Andrey Petrovich stared at him in bewilderment. “What wasn’t my fault?”

“Well, that guy of yours, you know.” Nefedov made a cutting move across his throat. “The one who’s been coming to see you all this time. I was wondering cuz it’s not like you to hang out with those types, but I just kept my mouth shut.”

“What types?” Andrey Petrovich asked, still stupefied. “Who are you talking about?”

“Who do you think? Them, the smartass thugs,” Nefedov snorted with distaste. “I can tell ’em a mile away. Spent thirty years training that sort.”

Andrey Petrovich grew cold. “Can you tell me what you’re talking about?” he pleaded desperately. “I don’t get it!”

“You really don’t know anything?” It was Nefedov’s turn to be stunned. “Check out Net News, it’s all over the place!”

Andrey Petrovich stumbled back into the elevator and almost fell into his apartment. He booted his computer up, connected to Net News—and moaned in almost physical pain.

“Caught stealing foodstuff, merchandise and electronic equipment,” the words blurred in front of his eyes. So did Maksim’s picture, but he forced himself to keep reading. “Household Robot-Secretary, enhanced self-learning model, serial number MKS-4355. In his statement, MKS-4355 said he unilaterally resolved that children were growing up soulless and took it upon himself to educate them on literary subjects outside of the established school curriculum, while keeping it secret from his owners. The manufacturer identified a bug in the knowledge control module and issued a recall for the MKS series while liquidating the defective #4355 from the force. The incident caused public outrage and raised questions about the loyalty and honesty of our machines.”

On disobedient legs, Andrey Petrovich staggered into the kitchen and reached for a bottle of cognac Maksim had brought a few weeks ago as yet another payment. He frantically searched for a glass, didn’t find it, and latched onto the bottle in a long gulp. But the alcohol was too strong for his old throat and he doubled over in a wheezing cough. His knees gave way and he sank onto the floor.

“MKS-4355,” he moaned, fighting a sharp pain that suddenly squeezed his heart. “A machine, oh my God, another faceless machine!”

He felt betrayed, cheated, humiliated. He had given this piece of electronic equipment everything he had—his knowledge, his heart, his soul. All this time he thought he was teaching a human being who’d bring the sacred spirit of storytelling back into the world. Instead, he had wasted his time on a preprogrammed whirl of wires. Literature was doomed, and he was doomed with it.

With a sudden determination, Andrey Petrovich pulled himself up and slammed his window shut. Then he stumbled over to the stove to turn on the gas. It would take an hour, max, and then it would be over.

His hand was on the knob when the doorbell rang. Andrey Petrovich moaned, but let go of the stove and staggered to the hallway. At the door stood two kids: a boy of ten and a girl, about a year younger.

“You give literature lessons?” she blurted out, her bright eyes dazzling from under her long bangs.

Andrey Petrovich was rendered speechless. “W-who are you?” he finally managed.

“I am Pavlik,” the boy answered. “And this is Anechka, my sister. Maks sent us.”

Andrey Petrovich gasped. “Who?”

“Maks,” the boy repeated with determination. “He told us to tell you, before they…
before he… before his…”

Anechka stepped forward. “As blizzards whirled around the earth and snow churned…” she began.

“A candle burned upon the table, a candle burned,” Pavlik continued.

Trying to push his pounding heart from his throat back into his chest, Andrey Petrovich swallowed hard. “I can’t believe it,” he whispered. “I can’t believe it.”

“Andrey Petrovich, will you teach us?” asked Pavlik. “Maks said you would.”

Grasping at the coat rack to keep his balance, Andrey Petrovich stepped back into his hallway.

“Come in, children, please,” he whispered. “Come in, children, my dearest.”

[A New York writer originally from St. Petersburg, Mike Gelprin has published more than a hundred science fiction and detective stories in Russian periodicals. His book, The Reluctant Nomads, will be released in Moscow this summer. “The Candle Burned” is his first story published in English.]

Two alternatives for having and reading too many books

Self-publishing for professors?

"New School: A Tumblr for Making Your Own Textbooks"

by

Sarah Rich
 
The Atlantic

Can a simple, easy way to build coursepacks catch on with students and professors?

Our first stop in Ann Arbor today was at TechBrewery, a co-working space for start-ups at the western edge of University of Michigan's campus. Housed in an historic building that was a brewery in the late 19th century and a foundry in the 1920s, the place has all the old industrial trappings that make for great collaborative work space -- high ceilings, big windows, steel trusses, and very few walls.

The first company we met was founded by a young married couple (the second techie love match we've encountered on this trip), Lida and Scott Hasbrouck, who sit opposite each other, bisected by two computer monitors, a stuffed koala, and their tiny, pink-sweatered dog. The Hasbroucks are working on a startup called GinkgoTree, which Scott says "will enable professors to divorce textbooks entirely."

Currently, Scott explains, "professors that are really trying to push the edge and combine textbooks with technology are hacking together all these solutions. You see Wordpress blogs for course materials ... and then there's this problem: in order to teach the majority of college courses, you need copyrighted content and textbooks. There's no good way to merge all of the cool stuff, like Khan Academy, and all this other stuff together into one solution."

Despite the dominance of educational-software giant, Blackboard, the Hasbroucks think their product's got a good shot, largely because of its relative simplicity. Ginkgo Tree presents an intuitive, visual interface, not unlike Tumblr's dashboard. For each course and subject, professors can upload links and images, embed video, post comments, and -- significantly -- import a chunk of scanned pages from print books. All of those resources get bundled into modules and arrayed in a navigable grid.

When all is said and done, the use of Ginkgo Tree will cost professors nothing, says Scott, and cost students far less than they would pay for the typical boatload of textbooks -- he estimates between $50-100 total per school term. Through an agreement with Copyright Clearance Center, scanned text costs around $0.15 per page (though it varies by book). So, as Lida points out, even a 100-page excerpt costs a fraction of a textbook's sale price.

Ginkgo Tree is set to launch in two weeks, with the goal of getting a critical mass of professors to adopt the technology for spring semester. "We just want it to be very simple, easy to use, and we're going to start small and build based on user feedback," says Scott, "Basically, it turns making your own textbook into a Tumblr blog."
They're self-funding the startup with the proceeds from 100,000 paying users of their popular notetaking app, Paperdesk.

Some thoughts by Sam Leith on the end of books

"Is this the end for books?"

Do you know what wilfing is? Have you heard of keitai shosetsus? Sam Leith on what to expect if the Kindle really does kill off the printed book

by

Sam Leith

August 14th, 2011

guardian.co.uk

In 1996, the US computer entrepreneur Brewster Kahle set up the Internet Archive, its mission being to provide "universal access to all knowledge". This admirable project strives to store copies of every single web page ever posted: a ghostly archive of the virtual. So what are we to make of the fact that, a decade and a half later, this digital pioneer is turning from bytes to books? In what seems, on the face of it, an act of splendid perversity, Kahle has set up a series of converted shipping containers in California where he hopes to create another archive – one that contains a copy of every book ever published.

His action touches on an anxiety. Are books, like defunct internet pages, heading towards the point where they will be archived as an academic curiosity? Some think so. You won't find any shortage of people willing to pronounce the printed book doomed, arguing that the convenience and searchability of digital text and the emergence of a Kindle-first generation will render them obsolete.

Certainly, electronic books have overcome their technological obstacles. Page turns are fast enough, battery life is long enough, and screens are legible in sunlight. Digital sales now account for 14% of Penguin's business. But there are reasons to reject the idea that the extinction of the printed book is just around the corner, just as there were reasons to reject the notion that e-books would never catch on because you couldn't read them in the bath and, y'know, books are such lovely objects.

Personally, I'm still in the habit of paperbacks. Much of my professional life is spent reviewing, and I like to scribble on my books and bend the pages back. Plus I can't be arsed figuring out how to get publishers to send e-versions. But habit is all it is. I've no hostility to digital. I've spent a good deal of time with the Kindle, and it does the trick.

In some ways, though, the question of whether we do our reading off paper or plastic is the least interesting one. More interesting is what we're reading, and the manner in which we do so. A large number of literate westerners spend most of their waking hours at computers, and those computers are connected to the web. The characteristic activity on such a computer has been given the pleasing name "wilfing", adapted from the acronym WWILF, or "What was I looking for?" You work a bit. You check if it's your move in Facebook Scrabble. You get an email. You answer it. You get a text. You answer it. Since your phone's in your hand, you play Angry Birds for five minutes. You work a bit. You go online to check something, get distracted by a link, forget what you were looking for, stumble on a picture of a duck that looks like Hitler, share it on Twitter, rinse and repeat.

Sci-fi author Cory Doctorow has called the internet "an ecosystem of interruption technologies". TS Eliot's line "distracted from distraction by distraction" seems apt. Zadie Smith, among other writers, has said that the key to the sustained attention required to create a novel is to work on a computer that isn't online. You could call wilfing multitasking, or parallelistic cognitive layering – or you could call it cocking around on the web. Whatever, it's fair to wonder what, if anything, it is doing to our heads.

There are two main schools of thought. One is that modern culture is making us cleverer. In Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson observes that IQ scores in the west are rising, and argues that pop culture – from soaps to video games to the web – is responsible. In the other corner is Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. He thinks the web is making us more stupid. We surf the shallows in a state of permanent distraction, and concentrate on no single thing for long enough to engage properly with it. Since much of our mental energy is spent processing the medium, little is left for the message. Carr, then, is a descendent of Plato, who mistrusted writing because he thought people would stop bothering to know anything if it was all there in books.

What both seem to agree on, however, is that a defining characteristic of digital culture is that it divides the attention. That has become a fact about the texture of our lives. We experience anxiety, fragmentation, semiotic overload. It seems logical to conclude, in that case, that books – particularly fiction – will not just be read in such an environment; they will also seek to reflect it.

Already, there's evidence of this. If it really were the case that our attention spans are shortening, you might expect to see a wholesale revival of interest in short stories, or even lyric poems, and a tendency for full-length books to shrink. But we're not seeing that. Instead we're seeing Wolf Hall, Fingersmith, The Crimson Petal and the White, The Corrections, Underworld, Infinite Jest, Tree of Smoke, and fat Stephen King after fat Stephen King.

These books may resemble 19th-century novels in size, but the pace of even the most traditional of them is faster. And in many – especially in Infinite Jest, a novel about addiction, entertainment, radioactive rodents and tennis – you can see a conscious attempt to engage with the phenomenon of information overload. You don't need to write a novel in tweets to write a novel about the experience of living in the age of Twitter.

An app for The Waste Land

But we can expect other changes. Most commercial writing is shaped by the market, and the market is shaped by the formats that have become standard; and those have been shaped by issues of portability, how wide you can make the spine without it breaking, the sizes of printing presses, and so forth.

Most novels, for example, have 300-350 B-format (ie standard paperback) pages. Deviate from this format drastically and your novel won't make it to the front tables of the bookshop. This means relatively few publishers do; and, in turn, the literary culture is shaped by that.

So, even if they now seem natural, the lengths and formats of books are but cultural accidents. If this all goes, there will be consequences for the shape, size and format of prose narrative. How far is up for debate. Fiction by mobile phone is still essentially at the gimmick stage in Europe. But in Japan, keitai shosetsu, or "cellphone novels", are composed on mobile phones and posted to media-sharing sites before being published in hardback. As long ago as 2007, keitai shosetsu accounted for four out of the top five literary bestsellers in Japan.

That's a bit ahead of us. But blogs-to-books is already a well-established pathway in the UK. Online serialisation, interactive narratives (AKA reinventing the Choose Your Own Adventure), even books written to order for subscribers are starting to emerge. Experimentalists such as Kate Pullinger – who alongside her straight literary novels has masterminded various experiments in narrative, including the collaborative online novel Flight Paths – are likely to remain marginal, but those margins are getting bigger. The boundaries of the book – as the success of apps for The Waste Land and On the Road, giving access to edits, revisions and encyclopedic paraphernalia – are becoming much more plastic, much less fixed.

There's nothing really all that new going on in kind, of course. Footnotes have always allowed you to nest one text in another; bibliographies have always embedded texts in a network of other texts; and the concordance (an index to every word in a work) looks very much like a search engine to me. But the difference in degree that hypertext (those endlessly distracting blue links) and electronic searches bring to those things can scarcely be overstated.

I remember hearing the story of the person who walked into a room and saw another man there, apparently transfixed by an object on a table. He appeared to the onlooker to be in some important way absent – there and not there, as if his soul had left his body. The onlooker, who had never seen someone reading a book before, concluded that he had been possessed.

That present-but-absent quality, the essential solitude of the experience of "escaping into a book", may no longer be the over-riding experience. The mass availability of electronic texts – infinitely reproducible and available almost everywhere – makes communal reading possible way past the book-group level. The same copy of a text can be read, annotated, and potentially even edited by any number of people at the same time.

So what we can expect from books is what the internet has always given us. More. More of everything. But what of taking in continuous prose, in the form conventionally known as "reading"? One way or another, that's here to stay. Now, if Brewster Kahle could only find me a comfy chair and some room in one of his shipping containers, I could get back on the job.

Books are not dead

This is Not the End of the Book: A Conversation Curated by Jean-Philippe De Tonnac

by

Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere

Jean-Philippe de Tonnac [Introduction]

Polly McLean [Translator]

ISBN-10: 1846554519
ISBN-13: 978-1846554513

"Open Book: This is Not the End of the Book"

by

Philip Marchand

July 15th, 2011

National Post

Fear not, bookworms and library rats. Two fellow bibliophiles, novelist (The Name of the Rose) and critic Umberto Eco, and playwright and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, have collaborated on a volume whose title says it all: This is Not the End of the Book: A Conversation Curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac.

Eco lays out his argument very early in this “conversation.” (Don’t ask me what “curated” means.) “There is actually very little to say on the subject,” Eco states. “The Internet has returned us to the alphabet … From now on, everyone has to read. In order to read, you need a medium. This medium cannot simply be a computer screen.” The implication of Eco’s logic is clear. E-books have their place in the world of letters, but not necessarily one of total dominance. “One of two things will happen,” Eco continues in his march of logic. “Either the book will continue to be the medium for reading, or its replacement will resemble what the book has always been, even before the invention of the printing press. Alterations to the book-as-object have modified neither its function nor its grammar for more than 500 years. The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.”

Now that what little to say on the subject has been said, we can savour what this particular book is really about, the spectacle of two European intellectuals exchanging aperçus. Here are the fruits of a lifetime of reading, stockpiled and readily available to both speakers. At one point, Carriere directs our attention to forgotten French baroque poets. Eco responds with a reference to neglected Italian baroque poets. They move on.

What really drives the conversation, however, is the subject of their book collections. “Not counting my collection of legends and fairy tales, I own perhaps 2,000 ancient books, out of a total of 30,000 or 40,000,” Carriere says. “I have 50,000 books in my various homes,” Eco comments. “I also have 1,200 rare titles.” Both men maintain they are interested in previous owners of their books. “I love owning books that have belonged to others before me,” Carriere says. Eco concurs. “I own some books whose value comes not so much from their content or the rarity of the edition as from the traces left on them by an unknown reader, who has underlined the text, sometimes in different colours, or written notes in the margin.”

Eco’s collection is more focused than Carriere’s. It is a “collection dedicated to the occult and mistaken sciences.” It contains works, for example, by the misinformed astronomer Ptolemy but not by the rightly informed astronomer Galileo. “I am fascinated by error, by bad faith and idiocy,” Eco tells us. He loves the man who wrote a book about the dangers of toothpicks, and another author who produced a volume “about the value of being beaten with a stick, providing a list of famous artists and writers who had benefitted from this practice, from Boileau to Voltaire to Mozart.” He adores the hygienist who recommended, in his treatise, the practice of walking backwards. Eco does not tell us how many of these books he actually owns, or how much he would pay for a first edition in mint condition.

Eco and Carriere exchange insider information about book collecting. You can find the occasional bargain, Eco says. “In America, a book in Latin won’t interest the collectors even if it’s terribly rare, because they don’t read foreign languages, and definitely not Latin.” A Mark Twain first edition is what excites them. De Tonnac asks each man about his dream find. Eco’s response is conventional: “I’d like to dig up and keep, selfishly, a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the first book ever printed,” he says. Carriere opts for the discovery of “an unknown Mayan codex.”

A more interesting question, posed by de Tonnac, is whether “an unknown masterpiece might still be discovered.” Eco’s response is similar to the comments of the late critic Hugh Kenner. Kenner pointed out that if a copy of the Iliad turned up for the first time today it would arouse an archeological curiosity but little more. Eco agrees. “A masterpiece isn’t a masterpiece until it is well known and has absorbed all the interpretations to which it has given rise, which in turn make it what it is,” he says. “An unknown masterpiece hasn’t had enough readers, or readings, or interpretations.” Shakespeare, in contrast, is getting richer all the time. Disagreeable though it is to admit this, the anti-Western canon agitators have a point — literary masterpieces don’t simply drop from the heavens, or emerge from the brain of an inspired individual. Fate and politics play their roles.

The conversation in this book is full of interesting and sometimes heartening tidbits. “We are living in the first era in any civilization to have so many bookshops, so many beautiful, light-filled bookshops to wander around in, flicking through books,” Eco assures us. It is also salutary to be reminded that the preservation of cultural memory is an ongoing, urgent task. We assume that the contents of libraries and archives are being digitized, for example, without loss of significant printed material. This is not so. Carriere says that a truck arrives at the National Archives in Paris every day, “to take away a heap of old papers that are to be thrown out.”

Of the two conversationalists, I prefer Eco. Carriere is a little bit too cozy with the eminent. “I sometimes visit second-hand bookshops with my friend, the wonderful author and well-known bookseller Gerard Oberle,” he will state, or he will refer to, “My friend, the great Brazilian collector Jose Mindlin,” or he will find occasion to recall scenes with his good friends Luis Buñuel or Jorge Luis Borges or Jean-Luc Godard. I know it is hard for a top drawer French intellectual to avoid this, and I may simply be jealous. But I also notice that when a banality or an outright piece of misinformation pops up, it always comes from Carriere. You would never have Eco stating, for example, that the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas is “a verbatim account of the words of Jesus,” or repeating an even hoarier canard, that St. Paul was “the real inventor of Christianity.”

Still, Carriere helps Eco keep the conversational ball in the air and free from any taint of theoretical jargon. Three cheers for these two hardy veterans of the cultural industry.

Thanks to POSP stringer Tim.

Borders bookstores to close...don't blame e-books

"Borders Group admits defeat, prepares for liquidation"

by

Jon Chesto

July 18th, 2011

The Patriot Ledger

It looks like Chapter 11 will be the last chapter for Borders Group after all.

The struggling retailer failed in its last-ditch effort to find a white knight buyer that could top a bid in bankruptcy court by two liquidation firms. The closings of Borders’ remaining 399 stores – including 13 in Massachusetts – will take place by the end of September, a move that will lead to the loss of nearly 10,700 jobs.

Borders, the nation’s second largest bookstore chain, conceded its defeat today by announcing that it will seek bankruptcy court approval for the sale of the company’s assets to liquidators Hilco and Boston-based Gordon Brothers.

In the final hours, Borders executives hoped the liquidation firms’ bid, valued at nearly $300 million, would be a starting point for an auction that was scheduled to begin tomorrow. But Borders said this afternoon that it was canceling the auction because it hadn’t received any other bids to continue to operate the business.

“We were all working hard towards a different outcome,” Borders President Mike Edwards said in a prepared statement. “But the headwinds we have been facing for quite some time, including the rapidly changing book industry, e-reader revolution and turbulent economy, have brought us to where we are now.”

Nearly three weeks ago, Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Borders announced plans to sell itself to a private equity firm that would keep the business going. That private equity firm, Najafi Cos., had plans to buy Borders for $215 million and to assume $220 million in debt.

But that sale fell apart last week after creditors objected because the arrangement didn’t prevent Najafi from acquiring Borders and liquidating the company. If Borders was to be liquidated, the Hilco-Gordon Brothers bid was viewed as the more valuable offer.

Borders had already closed about a third of its remaining stores after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February. The remaining Massachusetts stores to close include locations in Hanover, Kingston, Cambridge, Dedham, Mansfield, Downtown Crossing, Logan Airport, Marlboro, Taunton, North Attleboro, Swampscott and Swansea.

Mike Tesler, partner at the Retail Concepts consultancy in Norwell, said Borders’ complacent management failed to adapt to broad industry trends in the past decade.

Tesler said Borders executives failed to reduce the size of Borders’ stores to reflect the rising popularity of online book sales. He said they also failed to reduce their focus on CD and greeting card sales quickly enough, or to develop a popular e-reader business like rival Barnes & Noble’s Nook.

“It’s a case study in poor management,” Tesler said of Borders. “Talk about handwriting on the wall – it was paint on their freaking windshield, and they just kept driving. It’s unfortunate, because the people who work at their stores are all going to be out of jobs.”

Electronic books vs "real" books

Well, I guess electronic books are here to stay and to be improved, but one just can't beat holding a real book. I don't have a Kindle and doubt that I ever will. I am from the old school of holding books in hand. And, I do have a large collection of electronic books as files. Furthermore, there will be some books that will never make it to the popular electronic edition.

Well, Mr. Jefferson...I guess this will be obsolete.

"A New Page: Can the Kindle really improve on the book?"

by

Nicholson Baker

August 3rd, 2009

The New Yorker

I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one. "Say Hello to Kindle 2," it said, in tall letters on the main page. If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel "Moonlight Becomes You," the top line on the page said, "'Moonlight Becomes You' and over 270,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle—Amazon's new wireless reading device. Learn more." Below the picture of Clark’s physical paperback ($7.99) was another teaser: "Start reading 'Moonlight Becomes You' on your Kindle in under a minute. Don’t have a Kindle? Get yours here." If I went to the Kindle page for the digital download of "Moonlight Becomes You" ($6.39), it wouldn't offer me a link back to the print version. I was being steered.

Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important—that it was an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization. In the Wall Street Journal, the cultural critic Steven Johnson wrote that he'd been alone one day in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, when he was seized by the urge to read a novel. Within minutes, thanks to Kindle’s free 3G hookup with Sprint wireless—they call it Whispernet—he was well into Chapter 1 of Zadie Smith's "On Beauty" ($9.99 for the e-book, $10.20 for the paperback). Writing and publishing, he believed, would never be the same. In Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, confided that for weeks he'd been doing all his recreational reading on the Kindle 2, and he claimed that it offered a "fundamentally better experience" than inked paper did. "Jeff Bezos"—Amazon's founder and C.E.O.—"has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution," Weisberg said. "Printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence."

Lots of ordinary people were excited about the Kindle 2, too—there were then about fifteen hundred five-star customer reviews at the Kindle Store, saying "I love my Kindle" over and over, and only a few hundred bitter one-stars. Kindle books were clean. always been "I've always been creeped out by library books and used books," one visitor, Christine Ring, wrote on the Amazon Web site. "You never know where they've been!" "It has reinvigorated my interest in reading," another reviewer said. "I'm hooked," another said. "If I dropped my kindle down a sewer, I would buy another one immediately."

And the unit was selling: in April, tech blogs had rumors that three hundred thousand Kindle 2s had shipped since the release date of February 24th. Bezos wrote a letter to shareholders: "Kindle sales have exceeded our most optimistic expectations." He went on “The Daily Show” and laughed. (See the YouTube video called "Jeff Bezos Laughing Freakishly Loud on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.")

Amazon's page showed a woman in sunglasses sitting on a beach with a Kindle over her knee. Below that were video testimonials from big-name writers like Michael Lewis and Toni Morrison, recycled from the launch of the original Kindle, in the fall of 2007. James Patterson, the force behind a stream of No. 1 Times best-sellers, said that he enjoyed reading outdoors, where he had, he confided, a "wonderful back yard, nice pool, and all that." Patterson was pleased to discover, while Kindling poolside, that the wind didn’t make the book’s pages flutter. "There's just the one page," he explained. Neil Gaiman had moved from skeptic to "absolute believer."

Well, well! I began to have the mildly euphoric feeling that you get ten minutes into an infomercial. Sure, the Kindle is expensive, but the expense is a way of buying into the total commitment. This could forever change the way I read. I’ve never been a fast reader. I’m fickle; I don’t finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again. Maybe, I thought, if I ordered this wireless Kindle 2 I would be pulled into a world of compulsive, demonic book consumption, like Pippin staring at the stone of Orthanc. Maybe I would gorge myself on Rebecca West, or Jack Vance, or Dawn Powell. Maybe the Kindle was the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of.

True, the name of the product wasn’t so great. Kindle? It was cute and sinister at the same time—worse than Edsel, or Probe, or Microsoft’s Bob. But one forgives a bad name. One even comes to be fond of a bad name, if the product itself is delightful.

It came, via UPS, in a big cardboard box. Inside the box were some puffy clear bladders of plastic, a packing slip with "$359" on it, and another cardboard box. This one said, in spare, lowercase type, "kindle." On the side of the box was a plastic strip inlaid into the cardboard, which you were meant to pull to tear the package cleanly open. On it were the words "Once upon a time." I pulled and opened.

Inside was another box, fancier than the first. Black cardboard was printed with a swarm of glossy black letters, and in the middle was, again, the word "kindle." There was another pull strip on the side, which again said, "Once upon a time." I'd entered some nesting Italo Calvino folktale world of packaging. (Calvino’s Italian folktales aren't yet available at the Kindle Store, by the way.) I pulled again and opened.

Within, lying face up in a white-lined casket, was the device itself. It was pale, about the size of a hardcover novel, but much thinner, and it had a smallish screen and a QWERTY keyboard at the bottom made of tiny round pleasure-dot keys that resisted pressing. I gazed at the keys for a moment and thought of a restaurant accordion.

The plug, which was combined with the USB connector, was extremely well designed, in the best post-Apple style. It was a very, very good plug. I turned the Kindle on and pressed the Home key. Home gives you the list of what you've got in your Kindle. There were some books that I'd already ordered waiting for me—that was nice—and there was also a letter of greeting from Jeff Bezos. "Kindle is an entirely new type of device, and we’re excited to have you as an early customer!" Bezos wrote. I read the letter and some of "His Majesty's Dragon" (a dragon fantasy by Naomi Novick set during the Napoleonic Wars, given away free), "Gulliver’s Travels," and "Slow Hands," a freebie Harlequin Blaze novel by Leslie Kelly. I changed the type size. I searched for a text string. I tussled with a sense of anticlimax.

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?

I showed it to my wife. "Too bad it doesn’t have a little kickstand," she said. "You could prop it up like a dresser mirror and read while you eat." My son clicked around in the Kindle edition of a Bernard Cornwell novel about ancient Britain. "It's not that bad," he said. "The map looks pretty good. Some of the littler names aren’t readable. I'd rather be reading that"—pointing to his Cornwell paperback, which was lying face down nearby—"but I can definitely read this."

Yes, you can definitely read things on the Kindle. And I did. Bits of things at first. I read some of De Quincey’s "Confessions," some of Robert Benchley's "Love Conquers All," and some of several versions of Kipling's "The Jungle Book." I squeezed no new joy from these great books, though. The Gluyas Williams drawings were gone from the Benchley, and even the wasp passage in "Do Insects Think?" just wasn't the same in Kindle gray. I did an experiment. I found the Common Reader reprint edition of "Love Conquers All" and read the very same wasp passage. I laughed: ha-ha. Then I went back to the Kindle 2 and read the wasp passage again. No laugh. Of course, by then I'd read the passage three times, and it wasn't that funny anymore. But the point is that it wasn't funny the first time I came to it, when it was enscreened on the Kindle. Monotype Caecilia was grim and Calvinist; it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words.

Reading some of "Max," a James Patterson novel, I experimented with the text-to-speech feature. The robo-reader had a polite, halting, Middle European intonation, like Tom Hanks in "The Terminal," and it was sometimes confused by periods. Once it thought "miss." was the abbreviation of a state name: "He loved the chase, the hunt, the split-second intersection of luck and skill that allowed him to exercise his perfection, his inability to Mississippi." I turned the machine off.

And yet, you know, many people loved it. To be fair to the Kindle, I had to make it through at least one whole book. Jeff Bezos calls this "long form" reading. I had some success one morning when I Kindled my way deep into "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Erotic Romance," by Alison Kent. There are, I learned, four distinct levels of intensity in the erotic-romance industry: sweet, steamy, sizzling, and scorching. This seemed like pertinent information, since romance readers are major Kindlers. "The success of the ebook is being fueled by the romance and erotic romance market," Peter Smith, of ITworld, reports. Smith cites the actress and Kindle enthusiast Felicia Day, of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," who has been bingeing on paranormals like "Dark Needs at Night's Edge." "I've read like, 6 books this week and ordered about 10 more," Day blogged. "It's stuff I never would have checked out at the Barnes and Noble, because the gleaming and oily man chests would have made me blush too much."

E-romances don’t fully explain the Kindle's success—and the kind of devotion that it inspires. To find out more, I went to Freeport, Maine, to talk to Eileen Messina, the manager of the British-imports store just across from L. L. Bean. Messina, a thoughtful, intelligent woman in her thirties, has all kinds of things on her Kindle, including "Anna Karenina," Murakami's "Kafka on the Shore," books by Dan Simmons and Abraham Verghese, and the comic novel "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies." She is so happy with it that she has volunteered, along with about a hundred others, to show it off to prospective purchasers, as part of Amazon's "See a Kindle in Your City" promotion. Her Kindle was in her purse; she’d crocheted a cover for it out of green yarn. In the past, she said, she’d taken books out of the library, but some of them smelled of smoke—a Kindle book is a smoke-free environment. I thanked her and bought some digestive biscuits and a teapot, and then I went next door to Sherman's Books and Stationery. I asked Josh Christie, who worked there, to recommend a truly gut-churningly suspenseful novel. I was going to do a comparison between the paperback and the Kindle 2 version. Christie suggested "The Bourne Identity" and a book by Michael Connelly, "The Lincoln Lawyer"—one of his colleagues at the shop swore by it. I bought them both.

Outside, I sat on a bench near L. L. Bean, eating an ice cream, and tried to order "The Bourne Identity" wirelessly from the Kindle Store. But no—there is no Kindle version of "The Bourne Identity." What?

What else was missing? Back home, I spent an hour standing in front of some fiction bookcases, checking on titles. There is no Amazon Kindle version of "The Jewel in the Crown." There's no Kindle of Jean Stafford, no Vladimir Nabokov, no "Flaubert's Parrot," no "Remains of the Day," no "Perfume," by Patrick Suskind, no Bharati Mukherjee, no Margaret Drabble, no Graham Greene except a radio script, no David Leavitt, no Bobbie Ann Mason’s "In Country," no Pynchon, no Tim O'Brien, no "Swimming-Pool Library," no Barbara Pym, no Saul Bellow, no Frederick Exley, no "World According to Garp," no "Catch-22," no “Breakfast at Tiffany's,” no "Portnoy's Complaint," no "Henry and Clara," no Lorrie Moore, no "Edwin Mullhouse," no "Clockwork Orange."

Of course, the title count will grow. It will grow because not so subtle forces will be exerted on publishers and writers. Below the descriptions of all non-Kindle books for sale on Amazon, there's a box that says, "Tell the Publisher! I'd like to read this book on Kindle." If you click it, Amazon displays a thank-you page: "We will pass your specific request on to the publisher."

But say you’ve actually found the book you’re seeking at the Kindle Store. You buy it. Do you get what’s described in the catalogue copy? Yes and no. You get the words, yes, and sometimes pictures, after a fashion. Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don't fare so well on the little gray screen. Page numbers are gone, so indexes sometimes don't work. Trailing endnotes are difficult to manage. If you want to quote from a book you’ve bought, you have to quote by location range—e.g., the phrase "She was on the verge of the mother of all orgasms" is to be found at location range 1596-1605 in Mari Carr's erotic romance novel "Tequila Truth."

When you buy the Kindle edition of Konrad Lorenz's "King Solomon's Ring," rather than the paperback version, you save three dollars and fifty-eight cents, but the fetching illustrations by Lorenz of a greylag goose and its goslings walking out from the middle of a paragraph and down the right margin are separated from the text—the marginalia has been demarginalized. The Kindle Store offers "The Cheese Lover's Cookbook and Guide," from Simon & Schuster. "The picture of the Ricotta Pancakes with Banana-Pecan Syrup may just inspire you enough to make it the first recipe you want to try," one happy Amazon reviewer writes. She’s referring to the recipe in the print edition, the description of which is reused in the Kindle Store—there’s no pancake picture in the Kindle version.

Yes, you can save nine dollars if you buy the Kindle edition of "The Algorithmic Beauty of Seaweeds, Sponges, and Corals," by Jaap A. Kaandorp, et al.—it'll cost you $85.40 delivered wirelessly, versus $94.89 in print. New Scientist says that Kaandorp's book is "beautifully, if sometimes eccentrically, illustrated with photographs, drawings and computer simulations." The illustrations are there in the Kindle version, but they're exceedingly hard to make out, even if you zoom in on them using the five-way clicker switch, or "control nipple," as one Kindler called it. An award-winning medical textbook titled "Imaging in Oncology" (second edition) is for sale in the Kindle Store for $287.96. Tables are garbled. The color coding—yellow for malignancy, blue for healthy tissue—has been lost. Arrows pointing to shadowy tumors become invisible in the gray. Indeed, the tumors themselves disappear.

One more expensive example. The Kindle edition of "Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems," an e-book for people who design nuclear power plants, sells for more than eight thousand dollars. Figure 2 is an elaborate chart of a reaction scheme, with many call-outs and chemical equations. It’s totally illegible. "You Save: $1,607.80 (20%)," the Kindle page says. "I'm not going to buy this book until the price comes down," one stern Amazoner wrote.

Here's what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon. The company uses an encoding format called Topaz. ("Topaz" is also the name of a novel by Leon Uris, not available at the Kindle Store.) There are other e-book software formats—Adobe Acrobat, for instance, and Microsoft Reader, and an open format called ePub—but Amazon went its own way. Nobody else's hardware can handle Topaz without Amazon's permission. That means you can't read your Kindle books on your computer, or on an e-book reader that competes with the Kindle. (You can, however, read Kindle books on the iPod Touch and the iPhone—more about that later—because Amazon has decided that it’s in its interest to let you.) Maybe you’ve heard of the Sony Reader? The Sony Reader’s page-turning controls are better designed than the Kindle's controls, and the Reader came out more than a year before the Kindle did; also, its screen is slightly less gray, and its typeface is better, and it can handle ePub and PDF documents without conversion, but forget it. You can’t read a Kindle book on a Sony machine, or on the Ectaco jetBook, the BeBook, the iRex iLiad, the Cybook, the Hanlin V2, or the Foxit eSlick. Kindle books aren't transferrable. You can't give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.

On the other hand, there's no clutter, no pile of paperbacks next to the couch. A Kindle book arrives wirelessly: it's untouchable; it exists on a higher, purer plane. It's earth-friendly, too, supposedly. Yes, it’s made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world's oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it's fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it's difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years. But no tree farms are harvested to make a Kindle book; no ten-ton presses turn, no ink is spilled.

Instead of ink on paper, there's something called Vizplex. Vizplex is the trade name of the layered substance that makes up the Kindle's display—i.e., the six-inch-diagonal rectangle that you read from. It’s a marvel of bi-stable microspheres, and it took lots of work and more than a hundred and fifty million dollars to develop, but it's really still in the prototype phase. Vizplex, in slurry form, is made in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a company called E Ink. E Ink layers it onto a film, or “frontplane laminate,” at a plant in western Massachusetts, and then sends the laminate to Taiwan, where its parent company, P.V.I. (which stands for Prime View International, itself a subsidiary of a large paper company), marries it to an electronic grid, or backplane. The backplane tells the frontplane what to do.

The prospect of Vizplex first arose in the mind of a scientist, Joseph Jacobson, who now works at M.I.T.'s Media Lab and avoids interviews on the subject of e-paper. Sometime in the mid-nineties, according to a colleague, Jacobson was sitting on a beach reading. He finished his book. What next? He didn’t want to walk off the beach to get another book, and he didn't want to lie on the beach and dig moist holes with his feet, thinking about the algorithmic beauty of seaweeds. What he wanted was to push a little button that would swap the words in the book he held for the words in some other book somewhere else. He wanted the book he held to be infinitely rewriteable—to be, in fact, the very last book he would ever have to own. He called it "The Last Book." To make the Last Book, he would have to invent a new kind of paper: RadioPaper.

At M.I.T., Jacobson and a group of undergraduates made lists of requirements, methods, and materials. One of their tenets was: RadioPaper must reflect, like real paper. It must not emit. It couldn't be based on some improved type of liquid-crystal screen, no matter how high its resolution, no matter how perfectly jewel-like its colors, no matter how imperceptibly quick its flicker, because liquid crystals are backlit, and backlighting, they believed, is intrinsically bad because it’s hard on the eyes. RadioPaper also had to be flexible, they thought, and it had to persist until recycled in situ. It should hold its image even when it drew no current, just as paper could. How to do that? One student came up with the idea of a quilt of tiny white balls in colored dye. To make the letter "A," say, microsquirts of electricity would grab some of the microballs and pull them down in their capsule, drowning them in the dye and making that capsule and neighboring capsules go dark and stay dark until some more electricity flowed through in a second or a day or a week. This was the magic of electrophoresis.

In 1997, Jacobson and his partners joined with Russ Wilcox, an entrepreneur from Harvard Business School, to form E Ink. "When we first got involved with this, people were, like, 'Oh, you're trying to kill the book,'" Wilcox said recently, by telephone. "And we're, like, 'No, we love the book.' Unfortunately, we fear for its future, because people just expect digital media these days. The economic pressures are immense."

The newspaper industry, Wilcox figured, was a hundred-and-eighty-billion-dollar-a-year business, and book publishing was an additional eighty billion. Half of that was papermaking, ink mixing, printing, transport, inventory, and the warehousing of physical goods. "So you can save a hundred and thirty billion dollars a year if you move the information digitally," he told me. "There's a lot of hidden forces at work that are all combining to make this sort of a big tidal wave that's coming."

E Ink ran into some trouble after 2000, when there was less venture capital to go around. The company's direction changed slightly. It wouldn't make the Last Book, but it would sell other manufacturers the means to do so. The company's models were Coca-Cola—which grew great by selling the syrup and letting others do the bottling—and NutraSweet. "Imagine you're NutraSweet," Wilcox said. "The cola industry is already up and running. There’s no way you're going to make your own diet cola and compete head to head. So what do you do? You sell the ingredient."

E Ink’s first big, visible customer was Sony. Sony bought a lot of Vizplex display screens for its Reader, the PRS-500, which Howard Stringer, Sony’s C.E.O., introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, 2006, standing in front of a photograph of the electrophoretic version of Dan Brown’s "The Da Vinci Code." Sony set up an online bookstore, and sold its machines at Borders Books and the Sony Store, and, later, at Target, Costco, Staples, and WalMart. Sony is, of course, a deft hand at handheld design. Its Reader was very good, given the Etch-a-Sketch limitations of the Vizplex medium, but it lacked wirelessness—you had to USB-cable it to a computer in order to load a book onto it—and Sony had no gift for retail bookselling. Hundreds of thousands of Sony Readers have sold—and you can now read five hundred thousand public-domain Google Books on it in ePub format—but, oddly, people ignore it.

Along with Sony, several other companies rushed to develop Vizplex-based devices. Amazon was one of them. Since 2000, Amazon had been offering various kinds of e-books (to be read on a computer screen), without success. "Nobody's been buying e-books," Jeff Bezos told Charlie Rose in November, 2007, at the time of the Kindle 1 launch. The shift to digital page turning hadn’t happened. Why was that? "It's because books are so good," according to Bezos. And they’re good, he explained, because they disappear when you read them: "You go into this flow state." Bezos wanted to design a machine that helped a reader achieve that same flow—and also (although he didn’t say this) sold for a premium, fended off Sony’s trespass into the book business, and tied buyers to Amazon forever.

Thus, Bezos’s engineers—including Gregg Zehr, who had previously worked for Palm and Apple—ventured to design a piece of hardware. "This is the most important thing we’ve ever done," Bezos said in Newsweek at the time. "It's so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve on it."

But the Kindle 1 wasn’t an improvement. Page turning was slow and was accompanied by a distracting flash of black as the microspheres dived down into their oil-filled nodules before forming new text. "The first thing to note is that the screen isn’t like reading actual paper," Joseph Weisenthal wrote on paidContent.org. "It's not as bright and there is glare if the light is too direct."

The problem wasn't just the Vizplex screen. The Kindle 1's design was a retro piece of bizarrerie—an unhandy, asymmetrical Fontina wedge of plastic. It had a keyboard composed of many rectangular keys that were angled like cars in a parking lot, and a long Next Page button that, as hundreds of users complained, made you turn pages by accident when you carried it around. "Honestly, the device is fugly," a commentator named KenC said on the Silicon Alley Insider: "The early 90s called and they want their device back." The comments on Engadget.com were especially pointed. "It looks like a Timex Sinclair glued to the bottom of an oversized 1st gen Palm device," Marcus wrote. "That's some ugly shit," Johan agreed. "Was this damned thing designed by a band of drunken elves?" Jerome asked. CB summed it up: "It is truly butt ugly. wow. ugly."

Undeterred, the folks at Amazon gave the Kindle 1 a hose blast of marketing late in 2007. And they had a lucky break. Oprah, who had been slipped a pre-launch Kindle, announced that she was obsessed with it. "It's absolutely my new favorite, favorite thing in the world," she said. "It's life-changing for me." To counter the threat, Sony boosted its advertising for the PRS-500, but it couldn’t compete. Amazon sold out of Kindles before Christmas, 2007.

Reading the one-star reviews for this device, which accumulated throughout 2008, must have been a painful experience for Amazon’s product engineers. Yet they soldiered on, readying the revised version—smoothing the edges and fixing the most obvious physical flaws. They made page turning faster, so that the black flash was less distracting, and they got the screen to display sixteen shades of gray, not four, a refinement that helped somewhat with photographs.

Despite its smoother design, the Kindle 2 is, some say, harder to read than the Kindle 1. "I immediately noticed that the contrast was worse on the K2 than on my K1," a reviewer named T. Ford wrote. One Kindler, Elizabeth Glass, began an online petition, asking Amazon to fix the contrast. "Like reading a wet newspaper," according to petition-signer Louise Potter.

There was another problem with the revised Kindle—fading. Some owners (not me, though) found that when they read in the sun the letters began to disappear. Readers had to press Alt-G repeatedly to bring them back. "Today is the first day when we have had bright sunshine, so I took the Kindle out in the sun and was dismayed to see that the text (particularly near the center of the screen) faded within seconds," one owner, Woody, wrote. Another owner, Mark, said, "I went through 4 kindles til I found a good one that doesn’t fade in the sun. It was a hassle but Amazon has a great CS." (CS is customer service.)

Amazon remains fully committed to electrophoresis. "We think reading is an important enough activity that it deserves a purpose-built device," Bezos told stock analysts in April. Heartened by the Kindle 2's press, Amazon introduced, in mid-June, a bigger machine—the thumb-cramping, TV-dinner-size Kindle DX. The DX can auto-flip its image when you turn it sideways, like the iPod Touch (although its tetchy inertial guidance system sometimes sends the page twirling when you don’t want it to), and on it you can view—but not zoom on or pan across—unconverted PDF files. Some engineer, tasked with keyboard design, has again been struck by a divine retro-futurist fire: the result is a squashed array of pill-shaped keys that combine the number row with the top QWERTY row in a peculiar tea party of un-ergonomicism. Pilot programs have arisen at several universities, including Princeton, which will test the Kindle DX's potential as a replacement for textbooks and paper printouts of courseware. The Princeton program is partly funded by the High Meadows Foundation, in the name of environmental sustainability; for Amazon, it's also a way to get into the rich coursepack market, alongside Barnes & Noble, Kinko's, and a company called XanEdu.

The real flurry over the new DX, though, has to do with the fate of newspapers. The DX offers more than twice as much Vizplex as the Kindle 2—about half the area of a piece of letter-size paper—enough, some assert, to reaccustom Web readers to paying for the digital version of, say, the Times, thereby rescuing daily print journalism from financial ruin. "With Kindle DX's large display, reading newspapers is more enjoyable than ever," according to Amazon’s Web site.

It’s enjoyable if you like reading Nexis printouts. The Kindle Times ($13.99 per month) lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography—and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.

Sometimes whole articles and op-ed contributions aren’t there. Three pieces from the July 8, 2009, print edition of the Times—Adam Nagourney on Sarah Palin’s resignation, Alessandra Stanley on Michael Jackson's funeral, and David Johnston on the civil rights of detainees—were missing from the Kindle edition, or at least I haven't managed to find them (they're available free on the Times Web site); the July 9th Kindle issue lacked the print edition’s reporting on interracial college roommates and the infectivity rates of abortion pills. I checked again on July 20th and 21st: Verlyn Klinkenborg's appreciation of Walter Cronkite was absent, as was a long piece on Mongolian shamanism.

The Kindle DX ($489) doesn’t save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them—it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs.

Amazon, with its listmania lists and its sometimes inspired recommendations and its innumerable fascinating reviews, is very good at selling things. It isn't so good, to date anyway, at making things. But, fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there's another way to go. Here's what you do. Buy an iPod Touch (it costs seventy dollars less than the Kindle 2, even after the Kindle’s price was recently cut), or buy an iPhone, and load the free "Kindle for iPod" application onto it. Then, when you wake up at 3 A.M. and you need big, sad, well-placed words to tumble slowly into the basin of your mind, and you don't want to wake up the person who's in bed with you, you can reach under the pillow and find Apple’s smooth machine and click it on. It's completely silent. Hold it a few inches from your face, with the words enlarged and the screen’s brightness slider bar slid to its lowest setting, and read for ten or fifteen minutes. Each time you need to turn the page, just move your thumb over it, as if you were getting ready to deal a card; when you do, the page will slide out of the way, and a new one will appear. After a while, your thoughts will drift off to the unused siding where the old tall weeds are, and the string of curving words will toot a mournful toot and pull ahead. You will roll to a stop. A moment later, you'll wake and discover that you’re still holding the machine but it has turned itself off. Slide it back under the pillow. Sleep.

I’ve done this with Joseph Mitchell's "The Bottom of the Harbor" ($13.80 Kindle, $17.25 paperback) and with Wilkie Collins's "The Moonstone." The iPod screen's resolution, at a hundred and sixty-three pixels per inch, is fairly high. (It could be much higher, though. High pixel density, not a reflective surface, is, I’ve come to believe, what people need when they read electronic prose.) There are other ways to read books on the iPod, too. My favorite is the Eucalyptus application, by a Scottish software developer named James Montgomerie: for $9.99, you get more than twenty thousand public-domain books whose pages turn with a voluptuous grace. There’s also the Iceberg Reader, by ScrollMotion, with fixed page numbers, and a very popular app called Stanza. In Stanza, you can choose the colors of the words and of the page, and you can adjust the brightness with a vertical thumb swipe as you read. Stanza takes you to Harlequin Imprints, the Fictionwise Book Store, O'Reilly Ebooks, Feedbooks, and a number of other catalogues. A million people have downloaded Stanza. (In fact, Stanza is so good that Amazon has just bought Lexcycle, which makes the software; meanwhile, Fictionwise has been bought by a worried Barnes & Noble.)

Forty million iPod Touches and iPhones are in circulation, and most people aren't reading books on them. But some are. The nice thing about this machine is (a) it's beautiful, and (b) it's not imitating anything. It's not trying to be ink on paper. It serves a night-reading need, which the lightless Kindle doesn’t. And the wasp passage in “Do Insects Think?” is funny again on the iPod.

The paperback edition of "The Lincoln Lawyer" ($7.99 at Sherman’s in Freeport) has a bright-green cover with a blurry photograph of a car on the front. It says "MICHAEL CONNELLY" in huge metallic purple letters, and it has a purple band on the spine: "#1 New York Times Bestseller." On the back, it says, "A plot that moves like a shot of Red Bull." It’s shiny and new and the type is right, and it has the potent pheromonal funk of pulp and glue. When you read the book, its gutter gapes before your eyes, and you feel you’re in it. In print, "The Lincoln Lawyer" swept me up. At night, I switched over to the e-book version on the iPod ($7.99 from the Kindle Store), so that I could carry on in the dark. I began swiping the tiny iPod pages faster and faster.

Then, out of a sense of duty, I forced myself to read the book on the physical Kindle 2. It was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks. But never mind: at that point, I was locked into the plot and it didn’t matter. Poof, the Kindle disappeared, just as Jeff Bezos had promised it would. I began walking up and down the driveway, reading in the sun. Three distant lawnmowers were going. Someone wearing a salmon-colored shirt was spraying a hose across the street. But I was in the courtroom, listening to the murderer testify. I felt the primitive clawing pressure of wanting to know how things turned out.

I began pressing the Next Page clicker more and more eagerly, so eagerly that my habit of page turning, learned from years of reading—which is to reach for the page corner a little early, to prepare for the movement—kicked in unconsciously. I clicked Next Page as I reached the beginning of the last line, and the page flashed to black and changed before I’d read it all. I was trying to hurry the Kindle. You mustn’t hurry the Kindle. But, hell, I didn’t care. The progress bar at the bottom said I was ninety-one per cent done. I was at location 7547. I was flying along. Gray is a good color, I thought. Finally, I was on the last bit. It was called "A Postcard from Cuba." I breathed an immense ragged sigh. I read the acknowledgments and the about-the-author paragraph—Michael Connelly lives in Florida. Good man. The little progress indicator said ninety-nine per cent. I clicked the Next Page button. It showed the cover of the book again. I clicked Next Page again, but there was no next page. My first Kindle-delivered novel was at its end.

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I do recommend this book...

The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts

Here is a small excerpt...

Some years ago, a friend and I co-managed a used and rare book shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We were often asked to appraise and purchase libraries–by retiring academics, widows, and disgruntled graduate students. One day we took a call from a professor of English at one of the community colleges outside Detroit. When he answered the buzzer I did a double-take–he looked to be only a year or two older than we were. "I’m selling everything," he said, leading the way through a large apartment. As he opened the door of his study I felt a nudge from my partner. The room was wall-to-wall books, and as neat as a chapel.

The professor had an astonishing collection. It reflected not only the needs of his vocation–he taught 19th- and 20th-century literature–but a book-lover’s sensibility as well. The shelves were strictly arranged, and the books were in superb condition. We spotted some unusual editions and a few rarities. When he left the room, we set to work, inspecting, counting, and estimating. It is a delicate procedure, for the buyer is at once anxious to avoid insult to the seller and eager to get the goods for the best price. We adopted our usual strategy, working our a lower offer and a more generous fallback price. But there was no need to worry. The professor took our first offer.

As we boxed up the books, we chatted. My partner asked the man if he were moving. "No," he said, "I’m getting out." We looked up. "Out of the teaching business, I mean. Out of books." He then said that he wanted to show us something. And indeed, as soon as the books were packed and loaded, he led us back through the apartment and down a set of stairs. When we reached the basement, he flicked on a light. There, on a long table, displayed like an exhibit in the Space Museum, was a computer. I didn’t know what it was then, nor could I tell you now, fifteen years later. But the professor was keen to explain and demonstrate.

While he and my partner hunched over the terminal, I roamed to and fro, inspecting the shelves. It was purely a reflex gesture, for they held nothing but thick binders and paper-bound manuals. "I’m changing my life," the professor–the ex-professor–was saying. "This is definitely where it’s all happening." He told us that he already had several good job offers. And the books? I asked. Why was he selling them all? He paused for a few beats. "They represent a lot of pain to me," he said. "I don’t want to see any of them again."

The scene has stuck with me. It is a kind of marker in my mental life. For that afternoon I got my first serious inkling that all was not well in the world of print and letters. All sorts of corroborations followed. Our professor was by no means an isolated case. Over a period of several years we met with quite a few others like him. New men and new women who had glimpsed the future and had decided to get while the getting was good. The selling off of books was sometimes done for financial reasons, but the other thing was usually there as well: the need to burn bridges. It was as if heading to the future also required the destruction of tokens from the past.

The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

by

Sven Birkerts

ISBN-10: 0449910091
ISBN-13: 978-0449910092