I feel I must preface this by stating that I am not a total Luddite and can recognize the benefit that is possible in technology like e-readers. I fear, however, the loss of an experience by the constant advancement of higher technology into our lower technologies.
It is particularly strange to me given that when I was in high school I had to do research exclusively in - gasp - books when writing a paper. During my high school years the internet began to gain more of a following and use but we had only just begun using email. The internet for better or for worse was not a tool for education when I was younger. It is strange to me even now while reading a book to be able to access Google simultaneously on my computer and get background and biographical information, translations, definitions, critical essays, and literary analysis just by typing in the title as a search term. I can only imagine how this instant search-ability will develop in e-reading. I don't know if they can do this now but I foresee interactive text with the ability to tap and define words. There is a possibility in wifi enabled devices like the ipad to provide footnotes that take the reader to the original source material they cite. It would be incredible to be able to translate a text simply by the push of a button. The possibilities, as they say, are endless.
But what is the cost in human experience? There is something personal and treasured about opening up a well worn copy of your favorite book. I don't think powering up the e-reader to find your oldest download will compare. Also, I cannot tell you how many times someone has loaned or gifted me a book. How impersonal to receive an email containing a gift credit at Amazon.com instead of a heartfelt and thought through gift of a book. Let's say I read an e-book that I really like. Let's say it is a Metallica biography that I wanted to give to my friend (sorry if Napster is before your time). Will e-books allow me to loan it to them? Will they only have a limited time to read it? How will this work? This brings me to the final troubling aspect that I've been thinking e-readers have. Books are absolutely portable. Probably the most portable medium we have. They require no equipment to enjoy them. No batteries, no TV, no headphones. I have, as I'm sure many of you have, often taken my book and a blanket and sat in a park for hours reading. Or stuck a small paperback in my pocket to read on the bus. Or brought a book camping. E-reading takes reading and grounds it. You must plug in, at least occasionally, to READ A BOOK. That seems to me incongruous with the nature of books. Books are by their nature infinitely portable and transferable. E-books are limited in both of these qualities.
I am fascinated by e-reading and the possibilities and innovations it may entail. I look forward to our further exploration of this burgeoning media. However, for the time being I am choosing to keep a healthy skepticism about it. I miss getting letters in the mail. I hope I don't end up missing dog-eared paperbacks.
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It is interesting that we have largely found ways to avoid the sensation of "dog-eared" mobile devices and personal technologies. My old PowerBook has developed a funky smell on the keyboard, and I can barely open it any more. It is resolutely NOT like a good old book that stinks of picked-nose finger smudges, is covered with tea stains, and whose binding is disintegrating. Then there are the old phones: one is conditioned to get a new phone every one or two years, before it can start to emanate a hybrid stench of bodily fluids mixed with aging plastic. Old phones get "recycled"—shipped in other "less-developed" countries?—but do they keep their dog-earedness for those users, or are the old phones experienced as 'new' in a different way? I wonder: do the new media technologies need to outmode the very phenomenology of dog-earedness in order to demand accelerated habits of consumption?
ReplyDeleteWhile thinking about this I can't help but keep thinking of Fredric Jameson and his essay "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" I see these e-readers and e-texts as "new types of consumption; planned obsolescence" and a medium for subversive advertising.
ReplyDeleteBooks have a certain level of disposability to them as it is. Used book stores are stocked with discarded and well traveled texts. Strange to think that something so hammered could be so sought after. It is sort of sad to think of e-books not being passed on to the next person to find them, but rather deleted back into the ether from which they came. Not only the texts but the readers. Every couple of months it seems there is some new iteration of the Kindle or some other e-reader. The claim, of course, is that the old one is obsolete and outmoded while the newest model is thinner, lighter, brighter, faster.
I wonder about "the penetration of advertisement" and whether it is possible that books could start coming with pop-up ads or pages of advertisements or who knows what else in the way of marketing. Headers, footers, and sidebars could start invading the text. I hate to think that someday our "books" could look like our websites: 90% sizzle and 10% steak.