Pass the peace pipe: An armistice

Of late, I've resigned myself to the fact that eBooks are poised to edge out their paper counterparts. According to Wired, Amazon officially sold 143 eBooks for every 100 hardcovers over the course of the second quarter of 2010. The very infrastructure of the publishing company I work for is built on shifting material online. Fisher-Price is buzzing about the tablet-style touch screen iXL Learning System, to be released this holiday season, "hailed as the iPad for the fresh-out-of-diapers set." Bibliophile or no, I'm not blind to the book digitization trend, its inevitability, nor its copious advantages:

• lower production and distribution costs
• facilitation of interpersonal engagement, through multimedia content and connection to social media
• potential for enriched learning
• portability
• "Books are the items most standing in the way of my imagined life of portability." -Tanya Paperny on LitDrift

My yielding to the technological and commercial reality, however, does not concurrently relegate physical books to some cobwebbed attic. Quite the contrary. I think books will become objects of beauty, the province of connoisseurs (I will be one of them). Max Magee of The Millions wrote,

"In a sleek, shiny, distant future, books may feel old and impossibly large, with too much physical mass and all these fussy pages put to use for the simple task of storing a tiny amount of data, data that is not searchable or copy and pasteable or malleable and interactive in the ways we expect of our data....  And yet there is and will always be some beauty in books. And there will always be people who appreciate that beauty....  [Books] are something like snowflakes or at least stamps, so many and so few alike."

Magee predicts that features like deckle-edge pages, embossed lettering and archaic monograms, aesthetic details that celebrate the art of book production, will become more prevalent and elaborate.

Jan Swafford, in a Slate article titled "Why e-books will never replace real books," takes the same stance. He cedes the many benefits of electronic books, even announcing that his next book, on Beethoven, will be "three-dimensional," accompanied by a website with links to music, background content, and a blog. He concludes,

"So real books and e-books will coexist. That has happened time and again with other new technologies that were prophesied to kill off old ones. Autos didn't wipe out horses. Movies didn't finish theater. TV didn't destroy movies. E-books won't destroy paper and ink. The Internet and e-books may set back print media for a while, and they may claim a larger audience in the end. But a lot of people who care about reading will want the feel, the smell, the warmth, the deeper intellectual, emotional, and spiritual involvement of print."

I am comforted by these writers' support of the notion that physical books will never be just relics. We can celebrate the beauty of books without relocating them to behind museum glass. We can own an iPad and a bookshelf in tandem. Or in my case, multiple sagging-near-to-collapse bookshelves.

Corkboard

A case study...

"I have been using the Kindle since October, the iPad for one month, and I still buy books, lots and lots of them.

It’s a paradox of choice. In the evenings, after work, trying to figure out what suits my mood, I sit with all three of them. I am reading Nabokov’s “Despair” (the dead-tree version), trying out a free sample on the iPad (trying out samples is simpler on the iPad), and am midway through “To Kill a Mockingbird” on the Kindle. I still prefer the Kindle to the iPad for reading books, because with the iPad there is always so much more to do. I use it primarily to follow blogs like yours.

But, believe me, books (the hard copies) are not going anywhere. They rule."

-Anuradha Raja

Corkboard

"I love the typefaces and the bindings and the feel of well-made paper. But what I really love is their inertness. No matter how I shake 'Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,' mushrooms don’t tumble out of the upper margin, unlike the 'Alice' for the iPad. I never have the lingering sense that there is another window open behind page 133 of 'the lives and times of archy and mehitabel.' I can tell the weather from these books only by the way their pages curl when it’s hot and humid.

And more. There is never a software glitch, like the one that keeps me from turning the page in ebrary. And there’s nothing meta about the metadata of real books. You can’t strip away details about the printing of the book — copyright information, place and date of publication — without actually tearing off the binding, title page, half-title and colophon. The book is the book, whereas, in electronic formats, the book often seems to be merely the text."

Verlyn Klinkenborg, "Some Thoughts About E-Reading"

Mark My Words

I'm a bookmark rotater. Every time I start a new book, I slip in a different page-saver. I think of reading as an experience: each book has its own feel, smell, appearance and thus merits its own bookmark.

I have stacks of them in various drawers throughout my apartment. Creased and folded thin paper ones from Borders, sturdy laminated ones from elementary school art class, glossy cardboard American Girl Dolls ones, elegantly artistic ones straight from the check-out line at Barnes & Noble, or some stamped with readerly quips ("Ssh! I'm reading"). Some of my bookmarks aren't bookmarks at all: Phillies tickets, a swatch of red-hearts-patterned stationery paper that caught my eye. If I start a book somewhere away from my stash, I'll use a PostIt or a receipt or even a tissue. But it's always different, a marker linked to that particular text. Of course I reuse my bookmarks- their recycling is what infuses them with that treasured lived-in quality- but from one reading to the next, each deserves a breather.

It's been a while since I bought a new bookmark, but not for lack of temptation. I love these from swissmiss:

Obviously the migration of reading to a digital platform eradicates bookmarks. Saving your place becomes automated, and dog-earing a random page becomes a computerized mimicry:

"On any content page, use the scroll wheel to select the small triangle in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Click the scroll wheel and you’ll see the small triangle now looks like it was folded down."

What about my Phillies tickets? What about those American Girl Dolls bookmarks I've saved for over a decade? What about the comfort and familiarity of seeing a book sitting on your nightstand with a marker sticking out as a symbol of those hard-earned pages gone by, and the reward that is the rest of those pages to come?

Computerized bookmarking in general is a useful tool: flagging websites for future reference, highlighting or recording a note in Word to track your reading progress. But electronically bookmarking for-pleasure reading is just one more depersonalization of the reading experience. I'll take the frustration of bookmarks slipping out into the bottom of my purse over scroll-wheel-clicking any day.

iThink, therefore iPad

There are mattress pads to keep your mattress clean. There are brake pads to protect your car. There are paper pads, bound by glue, for notes and memos and doodles. There are that-time-of-the-month pads, crash pads, bachelor pads, lily pads, launch pads.

What about a pad that serves all those functions and has all those characteristics?

Steve Jobs has unveiled the iPad, announcing it “Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”

Gizmodo declares it, after a hands-on examination, "substantial but surprisingly light. Easy to grip. Beautiful. Rigid. Starkly designed. The glass is a little rubbery but it could be my sweaty hands. And it's fasssstttt."

The new device, according to Apple's website, starts at $499 and the first models will ship in late March. It's basically a laptop-cum-iPhone, merging email, photos, movies, the App store, and digital magazine/newspaper/book reading into one. With specific regard for that lattermost, Jobs unveiled the free iBooks app, which grants access to the built-in iBookstore. According to the New York Times' Bits blog, "Five of the largest publishers — Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette — are supporting the app." Advantages above ubiquitous eReaders like the Kindle are display aesthetics, as well as expedited availability of titles.

The iPad's touch screen and crisp display will supposedly maximize the user's experience, culling the most desirable aspects of various gadgets (Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, iTouch, BlackBerry, Android). It's the iPod's cousin: a product that is guaranteed to shake up the publishing industry in a parallel to the iPod's revolutionization of the music industry.

I've incorporated my iPhone into many corners of my life (excluding books, so far), from reading blogs and newspapers and magazines to watching YouTube videos to writing and receiving emails to managing my calendar and contacts. Same goes with my MacBook. My family has been a Mac family since before I was born, and I love the user-friendliness, sleekness and efficiency of the company's products. Maybe I'm being rewarded for holding out on buying a Kindle: I could realistically envision investing in the iPad once I cave- inevitably- on at least partially succumbing to the digital book craze.

For now, I'll put that $499 towards my rent check.