Proof that reading can be dangerous
What follows is a long and possibly rambling post about e-books, e-readers, and publishing in general. You have been forewarned.
I think I’ve more or less decided to wait before buying an iPad. At least until the early adopters have reported on its problems (and moreover their fixes), if not until version 2.0 is released. But the naysayers out there notwithstanding, I am extremely tempted. I’ve signed up to be notified when the first models are available for order, and though it’s no small investment, I may have to talk myself down from buying one when that notification arrives. I do, after all, have a birthday coming up in late March, and really it is very pretty and shiny…
Okay, so maybe it’s safe to say I am still a little undecided.
Because I think it’s a genuine innovation, a reasonably affordable cross between a laptop computer and an e-book reader. Obviously it doesn’t have all the features and capabilities of the former, and you can find plenty of people whinging about that online, but I’m not yet convinced that that actually matters. That it doesn’t have a camera certainly isn’t a dealbreaker for me — I think I’d prefer it without one, actually — and while its inability to play Flash is perhaps troubling, given how reliant the web is on that medium right now, it’s debatable just how much longer that will be an issue. I don’t view the iPad as a replacement for my personal computer, but as a lightweight, portable, and internet-ready extension of it. It’s easy to affect an air of being unimpressed, but as Stephen Fry noted after first testing the device:
I have always thought Hans Christian Andersen should have written a companion piece to the Emperor’s New Clothes, in which everyone points at the Emperor shouting, in a Nelson from the Simpson’s voice, “Ha ha! He’s naked.†And then a lone child pipes up, ‘No. He’s actually wearing a really fine suit of clothes.†And they all clap hands to their foreheads as they realise they have been duped into something worse than the confidence trick, they have fallen for what E. M. Forster called the lack of confidence trick. How much easier it is to distrust, to doubt, to fold the arms and say “Not impressedâ€. I’m not advocating dumb gullibility, but it is has always amused me that those who instinctively dislike Apple for being apparently cool, trendy, design fixated and so on are the ones who are actually so damned cool and so damned sensitive to stylistic nuance that they can’t bear to celebrate or recognise obvious class, beauty and desire. The fact is that Apple users like me are the uncoolest people on earth: we salivate, dribble, coo, sigh, grin and bubble with delight.
The device isn’t perfect, heaven knows, but it does look pretty darn cool. I’m not naive enough to think it will change everything, but I do think it’s a game-changer, or will at least make the game a whole lot more interesting and complicated going forward.
Take, just for starters, the fact that it’s a color e-book reader. We’ve seen a tiny few of those in the past, but none at these prices, nor with the iPad’s added features. I like the E-Ink screen of my Sony Reader, and I do have serious questions about the experience of reading longer books on a LCD screen. (Although not enough to really consider an e-ink knockoff like this one.) But there are simply some huge benefits to a color (and wider screen) when it comes to publishing, not least of all from a design standpoint. (And that’s even without discussing how it might affect newspaper and comics delivery.)
Graphic designer and book cover artist Chip Kidd talked about this at some length back in May of 2009. “Frankly, what would make me worried,” he said then in conversation with Jian Ghomeshi, “is if Apple decided they wanted to do it.” Aesthetically, the iPad represents a much more inviting interface for reading than the Kindle ever will, and it offers a wider assortment of design options. “I mean, the Kindle has one typeface,” Kidd added. As a designer, that’s kind of pathetic.” It’s hard to get around the fact that, right now, e-books are kind of ugly. But, as Sene Yee, Picador’s creative director, recently told Wired, “It won’t stay ugly forever.â€
The truth is, I still don’t buy very many books on my Sony Reader. Like Jonathan Strahan, I think it’s mostly useful as a tool for reading slush. I upload all the submissions I get for Kaleidotrope to my Reader, rather than print them out or spend uncomfortable hours reading them on a computer screen, and that was in fact the deciding factor in my getting an e-reader in the first place. But, with only a few exceptions, the books I’ve read on it have been free downloads from the publisher. I think this is actually a great way for a publisher to introduce a book or author, especially when they’re promoting a new book in a series and can easily make available the first book to whet the reader’s appetite. This is how I started reading Naomi Novik and Charlie Huston, for instance: at sites like the Suvudu Free Book Library, the publishers made His Majesty’s Dragon and Already Dead available for free, and they hooked me on the respective series. It’s worth noting that, while Amazon doesn’t advertise this fact too much, most of their top e-book “sellers” are free, too. (This complicates the already very complicated “What should e-books cost” question that’s ramped up quite considerably with the recent Macmillan vs. Amazon pricing kerfuffle.)
I still buy a lot of physical books, and I’m not above occasionally fetishizing them as objects. (Though I have nothing on Chris McLaren in that department.) And yet an e-reader that can more closely mimic that physicality, both in relative size and appearance, definitely piques my interest. There are a lot of books I want to keep on a shelf because they’re gorgeous in and of themselves, or because I have some personal connection to them, and for that buying an ink-and-paper copy still makes a lot of sense. There are books I want to read but not own, and for that there’s always the public library. But there are other books I want to own, for easy and repeated reference, for which I don’t necessarily need a physical copy that I’ll have to tote around every time I move. (Or replace after wear and tear.) Every e-reader, including my Sony one, gives me that last option, but the iPad is intriguing because aesthetically it feels a lot more like a book.
Obviously there are still a lot of questions about e-books, and also about the iPad, left unanswered. Will Apple’s new reader usher in a Huxleian nightmare, where “we’ll all be at the mercy of one of the world’s biggest control freaks”? Will it create a bizarre “future where applications and data in the cloud are more our own than the computers on our desks”? Will it actually enable creativity? Does the brain even like e-books? Heck, I work in publishing, and e-books are still pretty much a guessing game even for us.
But I do think the iPad has the potential to change things pretty substantially. Am I as over-the-moon about it as Stephen Fry was? No, but I do think he might be right when he says:
You will see characters in movies use the iPad. Jack Bauer will want to return for another season of 24 just so he can download schematics and track vehicles on it. Bond will have one. Jason Bourne will have one. Some character, in a Tron like way, might even be trapped in one.
For now, I’m still not sure if I will have one. But I’m definitely still considering it. Heck, this whole post has pretty much just been an excuse for me to dither about that a little longer. For now, I’ll just leave you with two more videos, two of my favorite recent “book trailers.” The first is for the New Zealand Book Council and is pretty stunning; the second is for a short story in Electric Literature #1, Jim Shepard’s “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You.” It was enough to get me to buy the issue.
Although it now occurs to me I probably should have bought the e-version.