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I don’t have a Kindle. Or a Nook, a Vook, a Dook, a Cannook, or whatever other silly name anyone wants to come up with for a “book reading device.” I don’t even have an iPhone and I won’t be buying an iPax—I mean iPad. Sorry! I get my menstrual devices confused. Why the fudge would I buy a friggin’ device to read a gorddarn book? Yes, I’m poor, but that’s not my rationale; I’ve found money for other things like the Wii and an HD TV and a trip to Iceland. But I have my priorities, and paying for the privilege of reading is not one of them. The Kindle promised to change my life, and now the iPad does, but so did the Segway, and what happened to that thing?
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| The Kindle (top) and the Nook e-readers. |
It seems to me like there are more cons than pros for these devices. Breakability is one. When was the last time you broke a book by dropping it? I will postulate never. The expense is obviously another con. Do I want to cart yet another luxury electronic item in my $20 Faux-kidoki while I traipse through the NYC subway system? I’d cry much less losing a $1 second hand paperback to a pickpocket, although I imagine he wouldn’t bother. What if I drop a reading device in the tub??* What if my cat sits on it and orders a bunch of books from the Rita Mae Brown and Stinky Pie Brown mysteries? And it only does one thing! Even my phone does more things than the Kindle, and my phone is a Snoopy desk phone from the ‘70s. (I know, you’re wondering what else it does. It’s a secret.) But lack of available titles is the biggest drawback.
I understand the rationale for these devices. I like the search capabilities, and traveling for a long period of time can be much more fun if I could pack a bunch of books. So I looked up some books I might want to read while backpacking across India—not that I’ll be doing that, but if I did I’d want to travel light. Quel surprise, few were available. Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist: no; Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String: no; Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives: NO!—and that’s a fairly recent book; David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest? Yeah, you can get that one. James Joyce’s Ulysses? :NO! NO! No Ulysses! And that would be the perfect Kindle book! There is some Kate Atkinson available, like the amazing Not the End of the World, and her newer mystery books, which I’m not as interested in. Her older ones, like Emotionally Weird and Behind the Scenes at the Museum are unavailable.
And this is what I don’t get about the e-book “revolution.” There seem to be a small number of early adopters, mostly people over 50 since they have more money, but it’s not a revolution. I know like 60 hipsters with iPhones, and only one person with a Kindle. OK, maybe three, but no more! Not really a revolution.
And, since I worked in the publishing industry for a long, long time, I can tell you with a certain degree of certainty that the e-book is not going to significantly reduce the price of books. Besides being poor, I’m also old, and way back in the day “they” claimed that CDs would be less expensive than LPs. The cake was a lie! The price of printing a book is probably one of the smallest items on the list of what a book costs. I don’t even want to tell you how cheap it is to print a book—you’ll shvomit. So the argument that the publisher is saving so much money by not printing that the consumer should get $17 off the price doesn’t work.
So, a lot of new books aren’t available immediately, but what about those old books? Shouldn’t I be able to get Kindle versions of those right away? If not sooner? NO! The reason that those pre-Kindle books are not available is because making an e-book file requires coding. It costs money and takes time. It’s not a free, instant, automatic process like some people want to believe. Even if you’re making the Kindle version at the same time as the hardcover, it still costs extra, and it still takes time. Some nerd up in Vermont or Bangalore is processing that file, and then checking it and probably making some fixes. And since all the e-books use different formats, this process needs to be done again and again. A book from the ‘90s or earlier may not even have an electronic file that can be converted, and you know what that means? Some lady in the Bahamas is typing up that whole book.
I mean, I like the Kindle and its friends in theory, despite the fact that they put book designers out of work. I like the “save the trees” thing, and I like thinking about what I would do with all the space I would gain when I got rid of my books. But you can’t get Stephenie Meyer to sign your e-book of Twilight. You can’t write little love notes to the cute guy you give a copy The Subject Steve. Hell, you can’t even give someone an e-book as a gift right now. The e-book is just not super-awesome enough for me yet.
* (BTW, my mom does read in the tub. She uses a make-shift double ziploc solution.) (March, 2010) |
