The Kindle saved my reading life.
That pains me to say, because as a lover of books I’m as ambivalent about what Amazon is doing to the culture of bookselling, book-buying, and book-reading as anyone else—but it’s absolutely true: the online retailer’s e-reader kept me reading at a time in my life when I was in real danger of being someone who only used to be into books.
This was a while ago. I’d gotten my first smartphone not long before, and fell hard for the constant access it granted me: access to people, access to the hive mind of the web, access to distraction. At the same time, I found myself suddenly unable to read a book for any extended period of time. It wasn’t that I no longer loved books—on the contrary, my interest in books and in the stories they told was as strong as ever. But I just couldn’t read for more than a couple of minutes at a time without wondering what was happening on Twitter, if that Facebook status I’d posted that morning had gotten any new likes, if my friend had responded to that text asking if he was interested in happy hour.
I loved books more than ever. But it seemed that the experience of actually reading a book, the experience of getting lost in a written story, was one I’d never again experience.
I still remember the exact book that pushed my discontent with this state of affairs to a crisis point: it was Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Pevear and Volkhonsky’s translation, if you’re interested). Nothing demonstrates the paradox, the absurdity of my predicament more than that title—my simultaneous inability to get into a book and my complete and total commitment to book-reading as a way of life. You don’t attempt to read a long-ass Russian novel unless you’re completely in the bag for books, the kind of person for whom “reader” is a badge of your deepest identity.
And yet I just couldn’t get into the thing. I couldn’t read more than a paragraph or two without grabbing in desperation for my iPhone—and reading War and Peace this way, you start to get a real sense of your own mortality, of time slipping through your fingers as you beat your head against the unwieldy tome. (“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” says Prufrock.)
So, I got a Kindle. War and Peace was my first purchase. And I set to reading it—transformed.
That was the beginning of what is now one of the longest, most sustained, and most fulfilling periods in my reading life—rivaling my discovery of solo reading as a precocious youngster who devoured all of Narnia and Middle Earth, and far outpacing my college English major years, when I read everything I could get my hands on.
In the years since getting an e-reader, I’ve read 38 and 42 books, respectively; 2014 isn’t done yet, but I’m on pace to hit maybe 55, the first time I’ve ever achieved the particular feat of averaging at least one book every week. I know plenty of readers who could put that to shame, format be damned—but for me, that’s pretty good. (Plus, I tackle a few long-ass books every year, OK?)
And there’s no question in my mind that the e-reader is absolutely responsible for the uptick in my reading. The experience of moving from print to digital on War and Peace was revelatory. E-readers (and, to a lesser extent, tablet reading apps), are a user experience with only one imperative, one call to action: you must read. They are digital hallways with no forking paths: you must go forward, or back. They are video games with only one way to win: turn the page, turn the page, turn the page, for the love of God TURN THE PAGE! Reading Tolstoy in print was, for me, a distracted, restless experience. Turning to the Kindle transformed the experience of reading the Russian master into a headlong rush. All my restless, distracted energy was transformed into forward momentum.
That momentum has hardly let up in the years since. Since it’s a Kindle I own, I’m limited in my ebook buying to Amazon—but I also borrow Kindle books liberally from my local library, an experience I recommend to every reader who’ll listen to me with an evangelical fervor. (On an e-reader, the exhilaration of getting books for free is only heightened, sharpened; the library’s digital stacks are more unlimited than its physical shelves, and I’m no longer limited in my borrowing by what my paltry arms are able to carry.)
I still read physical books—and when I do, I buy them from a local independent bookstore. But, almost to a title, the experience of reading these physical books is less immersive than the experience of reading them digitally, and every failed reading experience I’ve had over the past few years was print.
Writing this, I feel a bit like a person about to euthanize an old but beloved pet—I love print books! The smell of them, the feel of them, the look of them on my shelves. We had some good times together, physical books and me. It pains me to think that my relationship with them might basically be over.
But almost everything else about reading books on an e-reader is, for me, more pleasurable than reading them in print. The ability to look up words I don’t know, to search the names of minor characters I’ve forgotten, to carry an entire library with me wherever I go. Digital books are more easily picked up and set down—I more quickly abandon books that aren’t working for me, and pick up new books that might work better. And most of all, the ebook transforms literature into pure information: my separation from the story is as close as the thinness of the screen on which the words are projected.
There are major problems with the notion of a literary world dominated by ebooks. John Green’s recent warning against a book world dominated by Costco, Target, and Wal-Mart on the one hand, and Amazon on the other, is chilling. Booksellers and librarians are extremely important, and a system that doesn’t support them isn’t a system that should be opposed by anyone interested in the future of books.
But design always wins, and the design of the e-reading experience is a compelling one. It’s a common dictum in the book world that “print will never die”—and perhaps that’s true. But that belief can no longer be a refuge. If someone like me can (almost) give up on print books, then it can happen to anyone.
It’s interesting to read this post because I’ve never read an e-book, nor would I want to (though I’m not on Facebook or Twitter so don’t have that distraction!). One of the things that I most like about reading a book is the fact that I’m shut off from the real world for a while, often being transported to a more interesting place. I understand the attraction of ebooks - lower price and easy to take a library to the beach, but, for me, nothing can ever replace the ‘real thing’ :)
Why does design always win? That seems like a fairly contestable conclusion.
Suburbs continue to sprawl, no?
That’s a fair point. The design comment was a stray one—as unexamined by me as “print will never die” tends to be by people who say that.
I guess there’s design and then there’s design. Things can be very ugly aesthetically and even morally but still *work* well, you know? Today, suburbs are widely held to be hideous, but the reason they gained such dominance in American life is because at one time they worked very well for the humans who lived in them. The freeway, the subdivision, the automobile, the shopping mall, the big-box department store—these things may be ugly and damaging to humans and to the environment, but the reason there are so many of them is because humans at one time found them more useful and appealing in their design than the urban and rural alternatives. That we as a species couldn’t come up with a more beautiful and ethical alternative to this way of life is a failure of imagination. But design still won.
I suppose some people might make the same argument of e-readers: they may work and be convenient, but they are ugly and bad for the humans who use them. “Design wins” is, at best, amoral.
Of course, now that cultural moods and forces (price of gas, etc.) have shifted, the design of suburbs is starting to seem not just ugly but dumb and counterintuitive, and the new design solutions are about new urbanism that’s walkable and transit-connected. So if there’s any way out of our various predicaments as a species, it might be design—useful, beautiful, ethical design.
I’ll stop there because this has gotten quite long and a bit TED-talky.
don’t you dare TED-talk at me.
i hear your point. i guess mine is in yours somewhere. design may win but design A is not necessarily better (by other standards) than design B.
urban revival, etc. is real, by design, meant for environmentally conscious folks as well as city-dwelling urbanites.
suburban growth is NOT slowing, by design. for people who want suburban life and schools and homogeneity.
Yes, I think we agree. Design always wins. But that doesn’t mean that it’s good.
Which I think is what I’m ultimately getting at (albeit poorly). Design—i.e. the actual human experience of interacting with a given product, a particular made thing—will always win over what we might prefer to be the case. I love print books, but as much as I might prefer to interact with them to support the kind of publishing systems I grew up with and love and am nostalgic for, the ebook experience is so compelling, by design, that I’ve almost given up on print despite my fervent wishes to the contrary. Platitudes about how “print will never die” will not save the publishing industry as we know it. The only thing that will save it are even *more* compelling design solutions.
This is a good post for today…it’s intense and kinda scary! I appreciate your honesty. It’s hard for me to relate because I’ve struggled to be wooed by the e-reader…I guess I’m more indifferent than anything. But to know that such a sea change in my habits could happen is eye-opening.
I guess my analog would be my intense love of the ipod (not Apple as a company or an iphone, which I’ve never owned, just the ipod in particular) and how that design and mobility was sorely needed to keep up with my music habits. I consume far more music that way than by the traditional media, as much as I love a tangible artistic product. I suppose it’s the inverse of my book collection, which is almost entirely physical.
Weird.