Not a Book at All

They refer to the Kindle as an E-book, or as an electronic book, but I think what I’d claim is that it isn’t a book at all. A book is what is on my bookshelf. A kindle is a device for reading the text of a book. The reasons I say this are that there are so many things I had to get used to in using the K, things that were different from reading a book, that it has to be that this isn’t a book or an E-book or any kind of book, as I know it.

What kind of things? Well, I mentioned the lack of a color cover, which includes the lack of the flap jacket text and the author picture on the back flap of the jacket. Does this matter? Yes and no, I think, but in any case it is part of the book and not part of the K. The page size is not itself a lot different from a standard paperback, but once you’ve up-sized the letters, even only one increment, the number of lines on the page is substantially smaller (11 lines of text on the first page of Innocents Abroad (Mark Twain). I turn the page by pushing a bar (either one on the left or one on the right side of the screen, easy enough to do), but because there are so few lines on the screen, I feel like I am racing through the book as I constantly turn ‘pages.’ I have turned many, many pages, but I am still in the first chapter-- it's disorienting as to place, certainly.

In fact, the concept of page on the K is radically different from the concept of page in a book. The K, for example, does not number its ‘pages’ because it instead sort of numbers its paragraphs because the book page is not relevant to the K’s understanding of book. Now this could be not a problem, but I did find it strange because I'm used to a book's presentation of a page. I am on this page or on some other page, but I have never thought about the number of paragraphs in a book or that I am now reading paragraph 1789.

In addition, it turns out (and others have also commented on this) that we readers tend to prepare to turn the page of a book before we’ve actually finished the last line of text on the page. On the K, I was constantly pressing the button to turn the page at the point where I would normally prepare to turn the page, but it would turn before I had actually finished the page. I was pushing a different button to go back a ‘page’ constantly until I managed to get myself slowed down on the page turning bar.

When you put the K down briefly, nothing happens: i.e., the text stays right where you were when you put it down. But if you leave it too long, it goes into some kind of sleep mode and you have to press a button to get the text back. And that’s probably the most psychologically difficult part of the K for me. The text keeps disappearing on you. It has so far always come back, and back to where I was when I stopped reading, but the very fact of the text disappearing is very strange. What if the book on your bookshelf had only blank pages whenever you weren’t reading it? That’s what the K feels like it has….thousands of blank pages until I arrive. When a tree falls in a forest, is there a sound if no one is there to hear it? Are there any words in a book if no one is there reading the words? Not on a K there isn’t.

All said, however, I like it. I may just like the novelty of it but only time will get that information for me. I may be affected by the fact that I was absolutely knocked out by the book that I bought to read on it (Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, by Geoff Dyer: one of the most interesting ‘novels’ I’ve ever read; the kind that when you finish the last page, you just go back to the beginning and start over because you know you haven't gotten nearly as much out of this book as there is there to get out. It is a novel, but it reads like non-fiction in most ways. Dyer, in an interview, was asked whether it was fiction or non-fiction. He replied to the effect that he didn’t really care how it was characterized: ‘there’s only an inch of difference between fiction and non-fiction, and all the art is in that inch.’ (I am quoting from memory.)

There is the question of how, exactly, you own the ‘book’ you have bought given that you can’t give it to anyone else, as you would any other book that you bought from Amazon, and given that Amazon can, in the night—as it did a couple of weeks ago after some dispute with George Orwell’s publisher-remove the ‘book’ from your Kindle and refund your ‘purchase price.’ I’m not so bothered by these concerns because I mostly get books from the library so I can’t, typically, give them to someone else to read. I just tell them to get them from the library. And the bad press Amazon got from the latter event will surely teach them never to do anything like that again.

I’ll get back to you on this in six months, when I will have discovered whether in fact I do read regularly on it, or just use it as an occasional diversion from the old reality of ‘reading a book.’ My guess is that I'll keep at it, adapting to its differences, and in a year, it will seem just like 'reading a book.'