The idea of an electronic book reader has been around for a while, but Kindle is the first model to gain any serious traction. Several of our customers here at Peninsula Bookman have them, and most of them express that they are generally happy with the performance of the device. I have not purchased one of the readers, but I could imagine that I might if I were traveling more often – the one application that makes a lot of sense to me is using the reader for daily newspapers. Anyway, the idea is that you can carry lots of reading without carrying a lot of weight. From the point of view of the publishers, it eliminates the expenses of raw materials, printing, warehousing, distribution, and print over-runs inherent in traditional books – essentially all the costs associated with the sale of books but the cost of the manuscript. There is also a compelling ecological argument in favor of the device.
I suppose obviously, I count myself among those who prefer to have a physical copy of a book. There is more to the experience of books than the text alone. You can learn a lot about this by sitting here in the store for an hour, watching people select books. There is a tactile comfort in a book that is difficult to describe, but easy to recognize when a book lover handles the object of their desire. There is even the olfactory element. I would be a wealthy man if a dollar were deposited in the till for every time someone remarked on the odor of the bookstore when they walked through the door. Being surrounded by a roomful of books is a sensation that cannot be simulated. Aside from all that, I believe that the book is a perfected technology. My book “works” even when there is no electricity. It generally remains whole when dropped. In twenty years, when yet a new technology is upon us, my book on the bookshelf will still be mine and it will still be functioning fine. Books have permanence.
In July something happened with Kindle that I found unnerving, and Amazon is still trying to correct the problem. It turned out that a company that was selling George Orwell’s 1984 for Kindle and through Amazon did not have rights to the manuscript. Amazon’s response was to delete all of the copies that had been sold from the customer devices. The unnerving thing about this is not that there was a pirated edition being sold. What is shocking is that Amazon can completely and instantly delete a book from all these devices without notice or consent from the owners. More incredible is that it happened to be 1984. If I allow my imagination wander to an Orwellian dystopia, I can imagine a day in the future when all books are electronic, and should one offend the wrong element, a book could disappear so completely it would be as if it never existed. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, destroyed books are preserved in the minds of individuals, memorized entirely to prevent their total loss. Had Kindle existed when Bradbury was penning Fahrenheit, the eradication of books could have occurred in a keystroke, leaving no time to attempt to preserve a remnant of the texts.
Worse still in my dystopian imagination, there is a time when the book is surreptitiously altered. In the middle of the night, one edition is deleted and replaced with another. Strangely, a geology states authoritatively that the earth is but 6,000 years old. I was certain that I had read about a genocide in Rwanda, but it has vanished from all the histories. Iran-Contra … must have imagined it…. It does not require a paranoid mind to imagine the manipulations that might occur if they could be executed so completely and irretrievably.
Amazon is now offering to replace the deleted books with authorized editions, or offering a $30 refund. It seems to me they don’t entirely understand the problem. They have drawn attention to something that most of us would never have guessed at or imagined: that the content on the Kindle can be removed by the seller at a whim. Suddenly the book and one’s rights to a copy are less than ethereal or ephemeral. Suddenly this version of the book has no permanence. It seems that a bookseller should be guarding the gates against such an attack at the foundations of the book, not facilitating the assault.
