Chapter 1

You are the Reader--the controller of the iPad. Settle back, stretch out your legs. Perhaps you enjoy shifting positions--your attention flits from one thing to another (homework to New Orleans cuisine to Stanley Fish's latest blog post), and your ever-changing position mimics your thought process. Bed. Carpeted floor. Wooden chair by the TV. You turn off the TV. Place the remote control on the chair's armrest, change your mind, lay it on the floor.

Relax. Sunlight filters into the room from the part in the curtains--too dim. Adjust the brightness of the screen. Better. You press the Home Button on the iPad with your index finger, type in your password (0523--your birthday), and go to Settings. You sit back, throw your legs over the armrest and finally breathe. Relax. Anticipate.

You have found the ideal position: the iPad is propped up against your thighs. There is a small smear in the upper-left hand corner of the screen. You attempt to ignore it as you go on the Kindle App to read. The smear catches your attention; you sigh, tug on the long sleeve of your shirt, click the iPad's screen off, and rub at the mark. Your sleeve leaves a trail of streaks across the screen. You become obsessed. You press your tongue against the cotton of your sleeve--the sleeve is now damp, the ocean blue now a navy--and you return to the screen, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing--the streaks will come off--and then you stop to admire your handiwork. There are wet streaks and dust has collected in the crevices of your iPad cover.

Your ideal position has now been compromised. You decide--with an emphatic nod to yourself--that the streaks will not bother you. (You remember that your obsession with precision and perfection led you to snapping at anyone who dog-eared your printed books...You sigh in relief at the mere thought that books are now electronically produced and you no longer have to worry about broken spines and dog-eared pages and food stains).

Willing yourself to ignore the dust, you tap the Amazon Kindle app, and your library immediately loads. Swiping your index finger from right to left across the screen, you scroll through your library. You stop at your modest collection of Pynchon novels. With the tap of your middle finger you choose Gravity's Rainbow. You have read this before (twice), but you decide that there must be something you have missed in the past. You debate whether to go through your bookmarks and notes to spark some sort of argument in your head, but you ultimately decide on starting at the beginning of the e-book: your location is 1%, 1-11.

You begin reading "Chapter 1 Beyond the Zero." You skip over the quote by Wernher von Braun and onto the first sentence. "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."
The words are too familiar. You are having second thoughts about your selection.

It's not that you expect anything in particular from this text—you have learned that no entity is complete within itself, that no text will satisfy your craving for the ultimate text. There is no text without a sequel, an update; the ever-permeable nature of digital technology demands the constant evolution of textuality. You have learned not to expect a feeling of fulfillment at the end of a novel. You have learned to expect the novel's second edition to replace the first, with or without your consent. You have learned to save your favorite passages in a word document--one never knows when they will be altered by some unseen force. Presumably this force knows what it's doing--it may be presumptuous of you to save a scrap of text which the author wishes to alter--and you feel a pang of guilt, but still you save scraps and phrases which mean something to you, trying to preserve the relics of last year, last month, last minute.

You decide abandon your rereading of Pynchon in favor of browsing the Internet for a suggestion of something new. You open Safari and open one of your favorite blogs. Lucky for you, this blogger has just published a review of the new "digital translation" of Calvino's novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Modernized For The Digital Era! the advertisements proclaim proudly. An Ode to the Collaborative Force which is Intertextuality! Experience the Inevitable Thrill of Translation! You weren't sure what this meant, exactly, but the phrase was somehow compelling. So you opened your Kindle app and went to the bookstore. Good for you.

In the bookstore, you glance briefly at the Amazon recommendations. Your brother recently bought his textbooks on your account, and as a result your most recent recommendations are of varied content--textbooks on nuclear physics, Wodehouse novels, an interactive graphic novel by someone you've never heard of but you think your younger sister mentioned him, once. You pass these by. You have a limited amount of time. You can't go buying every book in the damn store--it would surpass the memory capacity of your iPad, for one thing.

You type Calvino's name in the search bar and allow yourself to be directed to the latest edition of If on a winter's night a traveler. A cheerful prompt informs you that others who have bought this item have also bought other novels by Calvino. You do not want other novels by Calvino. You select If on a winter's night a traveler, and you buy it.

Once you've tapped the purchase button, the iPad screen flashes to your electronic library. A small, somewhat transparent digital cover of If On a Winter's Night a Traveler appears on your shelf next to The King James Bible (free edition) and Reading Borges After Benjamin (which you bought in hopes of doing some extra reading for your Reading W/ the Digital Human class but have yet to finish). You patiently watch the little bar signifying the progress of the download of your book fill with blue. The progress bar vanishes and the cover becomes opaque.

You are now ready to begin reading Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

Microsoft's prototype ipad competitor

Microsoft has an interesting video here on engadget showing a conceptual touchscreen device that seems geared toward productivity. It is not exactly an e-reader, or perhaps I should say not simply an e-reader, but watch the video it has some interesting features.

Also here is a good slideshow of the pros and cons of six e-readers that aren't the ipad.

I hope I don't miss books.

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.