An Article in The Atlantic about E-Books

      An article in the Atlantic called "Why Are E-Books So Terrible?" caught my attention, and might interest you too. The writer is Ian Bogost, a contributing writing there and director of a program in film & media at Washington University in St. Louis. As a big fan of e-books, I was ready to be offended, and I was, mildly, particularly by his neologism "bookiness." What an unpleasant word. I was also annoyed by several of his unsupported statements--that no self-published books are ever laid out "in a manner that conforms with received standards" and for his insistence that the technology of books has barely changed over the centuries. He barely mentions moveable type, and skips over cheap paper backs entirely.
     On the other hand, he supports my idea that e-books work best with strong narrative-- " fiction in general and genre fiction—such as mysteries, sci-fi, young-adult fiction, and romance." I'd add to that list biography and a lot of history as well. In other words, stories are great in the endless flow of the digital screen. What is much harder in an e-book, I agree, is to have what he calls random access, " the ur-feature of the codex.... for skimming back and forth....For [readers who like to move back and forth], ideas are attached to the physical memory of the book's width and depth—a specific notion residing at the top of a recto halfway in, for example, like a friend lives around the block and halfway down."
     This is a very fair critique of e-book technology and something I'd really like to see the engineers work on. It's hard even to find your place again in an e-book. I agree that e-books support the reading habits of people who like to carry a large number of books at once (my Kindle has all of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, as well as a slew of my other out-of-copyright favorites). It also supports those who love a direct flow, endless story, and don't care so much about annotating. He's a little snarky about genre fiction (although he insists he's not), and reveals that he reads mostly scholarly and trade nonfiction. He doesn't like it when books all look the same.
     Bogost, like a lot of my friends, values books as objects along with what they communicate to us in their text. He says, " I also can't quite wrap my spleen [my spleen???] around every book looking and feeling the same, like they do on an e-book reader. For me, bookiness partly entails the uniqueness of each volume—its cover, shape, typography, and layout."
     I read codex books too, of course. Right now, I'm reading on my Kindle, Le Rouge et le Noir, in English   (either free or almost free–I can' remember if I got it from the Gutenberg Project or on sale from Amazon) and a Michael Connelly crime novel that I borrowed from the public library. I am also reading a huge and gorgeously illustrated physical art book from the Metropolitan Museum that is the catalog of their recent exhibition of Medici portraiture, and I also just ordered a physical copy of a fantasy novel through the used book site Bookfinder.com . It wasn't available at the library, and I avoid paying Amazon's high e-book prices.
     In other words, why bother to hate e-books when they are one of a variety of ways to do your reading? And how can a person not love the wonder and security of carrying Jane Austen's entire oeuvre around in your shoulder bag?