Bookshelves in my house attest to that fact I’m an inveterate reader and book collector. I love books. A carefully designed cover and typeface add to the pleasure of visiting new worlds of ideas.
Words have traveled from stories recited around the fire pit to the shelves of libraries and giant booksellers, brick and otherwise. But while I am I technology worker, I’ve been reluctant to adopt the e-book and to take up the screen. It seemed like a question of loyalty. How could I forsake a friend for the sake of novelty?
Two words: space and money.
The limitations of my physical living space first helped me to rediscover the public library. I could borrow books and return them without a need to covet their pages on my personal shelves. Then there was the question of money. Books like everything else have become enormously expensive. Those two factors pushed me toward accepting in this case, the iPad, an aesthetic device that made me feel better about being a traitor to the printed word. But I forgave myself. Didn’t Gutenberg turn everything upside down with the invention of printing press, making knowledge accessible to people who never had the chance?
I got over my initial hurtle, which has opened a new relation to the book. The word has been liberated from its covers in the way that songs were released from their place inside albums and CDs.
My first e-book read was “Distrust That Particular Flavor,” a nonfiction collection by science fiction writer, William Gibson.
While I’ve been aware of Gibson, my sci-fi reading has mostly been limited to authors like Harlan Ellison, Robert Heinlein, and Ursula Le Guin. Anyhow, Gibson’s book struck me as a good place to begin the experiment. I downloaded a copy. Here are my initial responses.
Whoa! This is a different place. The change is absorbing me more right now than the book.
I don’t have any sense how “far” I am into Gibson since the book itself is a flat screen and I can’t physically hold any number of pages in my hand. What I hold is my iPad, a device that doubles and triples as a browser, a game center, camera, and so many other things that is only limited by the number of “apps” I have downloaded from the Internet.
What I hold is not a book, although I could be resting on my bed propped up by pillows. But the device itself is not a singular one. Although referenced by one brand name, an electronic reader can be a pliable platform, capable of being transformed as soon as I finish reading. In fact, I can listen to music on the same device while I read. And the difference in the physical experience doesn’t stop there.
I’m not physically aware of the place I am relative to the entire manuscript. Without a physical book, I can’t see where I place my bookmark. Of course I know when I begin the first page, but as I continue, the only marker I have is the page number displayed at the bottom of the screen. The iPad conveniently inserts its own electronic bookmark, automatically opening to the page where I left off. The electronic book eliminates the obvious beginning, middle and end or “linear” quality of books.
No longer recognizably moving along a trajectory from point A to point B until I put the book down with hopefully a satisfied exhalation, I am just always “reading.” What I am left with are individual words that have been freed from their book covers, naked as they were, to travel the Internet
I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing. But it’s different. Maybe reading Gibson is helping me to think this way.
