Despite being a passionate lifelong book-reader, and working on a number of digital publishing projects professionally, I still don’t own a Kindle*. On paper (no pun intended) I should have been a massive early adopter and leading the charge, but something’s always held me back and I’ve never yet taken the time to properly articulate the reasons for my reluctance.
I want to want to own a Kindle. I want to want to buy loads of books for it. But deep down I don’t actually want to, at least not yet, and I think there are four main reasons why.
1) The best camera is the one that’s with you
I don’t have a Kindle for the same reason I don’t have a separate point-and-shoot digital camera anymore – I have multipurpose devices that fill that role for me. It’s why I spend a whole bunch of money each month to pay for an iPhone (lucky enough to have access to an iPad through work, but would definitely buy one if I didn’t). They’re general computing devices that do a lot of things well (or at least well enough), including e-reading. Indeed, I’ve burned through a whole bunch of public domain works on the free Stanza app (Edgar Rice Burroughs at the moment. Oh Tarzan, you’re such a product of your time).
2) My name is Trevor Klein, and I’m a book bully
“Yes just like the Escapist in Kavalier and Clay.”
“What’s that?”
“You haven’t read the The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay?! To the bookden!”
Conversations like this are why I’ve been called a book bully by colleagues and friends. Admittedly I can be a bit overzealous in lending books that I consider must-reads. And perhaps a bit too relentless in my vicarious need to recapture the magic I felt reading it for the first time (“How are you finding it?” “How far have you got?” “What do you mean you haven’t read anymore since yesterday, what have you been doing?!” “STOP WALKING AWAY FROM ME AND DISCUSS THIS BOOK.”).
Anyway! For me this ability to share is a really important part of the book buying process. When I buy a book it’s not just so I can re-read it, but because I think it’s important enough for me to want the potential to lend it to friends in the future. Sadly, I’ve yet to come across an elegant enough digital solution that’ll let me carry on doing this.
And, by the way, you should DEFINITELY read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
3) To the bookden!
Too small to be a room, too big to be a cupboard, there’s a space in my flat that you can walk into and be surrounded by shelves. Shelves filled with hundreds of books (and some DVDs). I call it the bookden because I’m the kind of loser who names rooms and a few times each week I’ll wander in, spend a few minutes scanning the shelves, before picking a book to read (or re-read). It’s deeply, deeply satisfying.
Seeing things like Hodderscape’s Shelf of Glory (scroll down), and remembering I’m not alone in this Showing-off Slightly Obsessive Organising and Displaying and Browsing book behaviour is also, frankly, pretty satisfying.
It’ll be a hard thing to give up if there’s nothing to replace it.
4) Hardware and software and content, oh my!
I watch TV/films, listen to music, read books and play games. All of these are authored to some degree, and available in physical forms I can own and store in my home, whether that’s CDs, DVDs or hardbacks. Being a modern sort of person in the 21st century, I’m increasingly getting this authored entertainment through digital distribution channels. So, I don’t buy CDs anymore, I buy from iTunes; I don’t buy boxed games anymore, I buy apps.
Why don’t I do the same with books? 99.99% of my book purchases are still physical** (albeit usually over the web – hi Amazon!).
I think it comes down to a conceptual distinction between hardware, software and content.
In the case of music there’s some content (a song), a bit of hardware to play the song, and a bit of software to make sure the hardware knows what to do with the song. Sometimes the content itself is stored on a bit of hardware (like a CD) that needs to go into another bit of hardware (a CD player) because the CD player is bundled with the software that can interpret the content on the CD (make it loud enough to rock the house). On its own the CD isn’t much use, as it’s just content storage, without any interpretative software or hardware to play it.
An mp3 is fundamentally no different. It’s content, encoded in a memory efficient way, and needing a particular piece of software (iTunes, Winamp) to interpret it so that it can be played on a piece of hardware (PC, iPod, etc).
Printed books are different. They’re content (words and pictures), they’re hardware (bound pages) AND, crucially, they’re also software. The software is the bit that says this page comes before that page, but this page comes after. This sentence first, then that one. The printing process of typesetting and ordering a text is implicitly bundling the software that interprets the content in with the hardware.
And it’s a bally good bit of hardware. Very portable, great random access, durable, infinite battery life, no screen glare, high resolution, no software updates needed, no risk of obsolescence, and it’s attractive to look at. The books I’ve been given by my parents and grandparents work just as well now as they did 20, 30, 60 years ago. Out of approximately 1,000 books, I’ve only ever had one with a binding that fell apart on me (I’m looking at you, “Are you Dave Gorman?”). There’s not much other authored content you can point at that has the same amazing unity and quality of hardware, software and content (except perhaps board games). Printed books are special.
I just don’t have that same confidence in digital book files and e-readers yet. If I invest in an e-book collection, essentially duplicating my favourite books and then buying solely digitally from then on, can I be guaranteed the same longevity, reliability and quality of content, software and hardware?
I know that the whole industry is working on it, and this is in no way meant to be a slight on the incredible work that so many publishers, retailers and technology companies are doing. But, for me personally, looking at the current technology, at the fragmentation in software and hardware for what, in theory, should be the simplest bit of digital publishing – do what a printed book does at least as well as a printed book does it – I just don’t think we’re there yet. But I really, really want us to be!
It might be different for me if there was a consumer level technology that let me quickly and easily scan in my books for use in e-readers (someone please invent this with magic) in the same way as I can rip my CDs. But there isn’t.
Until then, I’ll raise a salute to the publishers, retailers and technologists who are doing there best to Sort It All Out, and to the growing army of e-readers who DO have a Kindle (or other e-reader) and are buying e-books. It’s clearly meeting your needs, even if it hasn’t quite met mine yet.
But it will. One day.
I hope.
* or any other kind of dedicated e-reader.
** the 0.01% of books that I am buying digitally will be the subject of another blog, but in brief I’m buying them because they are genuinely digital books doing something that I consider valuable. Something that couldn’t be done in print.
