Symptom: I keep forgetting the title of the book I’m reading. Diagnosis: advancing age? Maybe. But the differential diagnosis should definitely include e-reading.
Open a printed book: Before you finish a single sentence, you have responded to cues that were designed to stimulate—and manage—your reading experience.
The strongest signals come from the book’s shape and cover. Coffee-table extravaganza or supermarket pulp fiction? Author’s bio, flap copy, babbling blurbs? All that packaging is coordinated into a message about genre and target reader. Stephen King has his cover font, and so do J.K. Rowling, Nora Roberts, James Patterson, Danielle Steel, and R.L. Stine. Harlequin romances barely alter their covers within a given series, lest their readers stray. My own library is pretty darn eclectic, but I have a particular attachment to my orange-bound Penguin Editions, flying dolphins on Houghton Mifflin’s old Riverside Editions, the compact Oxford hardcovers of Trollope, and the beautiful Library of America volumes.
What is the title of my current e-book? When I’m not actually in the act of reading, the author and title are far less of a presence than they used to be. When I open (activate? illuminate?) my e-reader, I am presented with the last page I read. Convenient, yes, but devoid of context. No cover means no strong visual cue to reinforce just who and what I am reading. All gone in a digital flash.
Consider this an observation, not a complaint. I love having my e-library always with me. I never worry about finishing my book before a trip ends, because I always have another one with me. Or I can buy one in a New York wireless minute. In some ways, my newly minimalist collection, stripped of external cues like form and cover (other than a teensy thumbnail), hearkens back to the aristocratic library of an earlier century, when books were encased in matching custom bindings that had everything to do with the bookbinder’s art and nothing to do with branding or stimulating consumption.
Digital publishing has severed the relationship between books and their packaging. Take pagination, which used to be pretty darn simple. Now you might answer the question “Where are you in the book?” with a page number, a percentage point, or (for my beloved audiobook format) the hour.
E-books also transform the public/private side of reading—and how we chose our books. The physical book used to send a message to strangers, together with our shopping bag, say, from Hermes or Harry’s Shoes. Now no one knows what we are reading. There is no chance encounter with another commuter, no shared smile that we are both reading the same pages. Even if someone tries to look over our shoulder, it’s hard to get enough text to judge even the title in most cases. Our reading choices are between us and our reading device. And isn’t that a cold phrase for the thing that was formerly known as a book?
Seems like just yesterday that I was riding the subway, observing a row of people holding the same distinctive paperback. Where would Stieg Larsson have been without that screaming yellow cover?
We’re not there yet, but it’s coming: a row of people holding anonymous digital slates.
Something will certainly be lost with these disassociated texts ... and something gained. Confession: For someone who once taught “The Victorian Novel,” I enjoy some really trashy books. But I like my guilty pleasures, mixing up the good stuff with minor mysteries, stupid spy thrillers, and unscientific science fiction. Call me a snob, but I don’t think I would have been caught dead carrying a copy of American Assassin. Until this moment, I kept silent about my reading habits, like my inexplicable affinity for the truly nasty violent world of Vince Flynn, which, weirdly, I first discovered right after falling in love again with Charlotte Brontë's Villette. And now they both live in harmony on my iPad.
For inspiration about my next read, I used to scan the New York Times best-seller list. Whoa, have you looked at it lately? It has metastasized into a bewildering series of choices, segmented into 22 ridiculous categories. How many readers know or care that much about the format of the book, as opposed to its content? In fact, how many readers even understand these distinctions (paperback trade edition versus paperback mass-market, print versus e-book, and other combinations)? It’s hard to believe that anybody thinks the lists are worth several pages in an increasingly skinny book section. Save it for the publishing cognoscenti.
We have already lived through this transition in music, as digital downloads have replaced record stores and dispensed with album covers. That has been a messy and painful process that disrupted an entire industry, commercially and artistically. Now it is publishers’ turn. But despite more than a decade to prepare, book publishers don’t appear to have learned a whole lot from their beaten-down brethren in the music business. Most e-books are a crude translation of print to digital. So far, there is little innovation in providing extra material, or tempting the reader with another offering from an author’s oeuvre (you liked Villette? You’re gonna love Shirley!). You can’t lend an e-book, and even giving a gift is rough.
And then: How do we choose books when we can’t see and touch them, when a self-published e-book looks just like one from Knopf, when there is no bookstore with its “recommended books from our staff,” and when the best-seller lists are confusing?
The same way we always did: word of mouth. Except that those mouths are moving from the subway and the water cooler to online bookstores and blogs and specialty social-media sites such as Goodreads. Somehow, books are finding their readers.
After this first year of almost 100 percent e-reading, I have regained some confidence that the printed book will survive, albeit in about the same diminished market as vinyl records. (It’s interesting that teenagers are among the most likely to purchase print copies.) Let’s face it: Most books are not worth a second reading or the effort to squeeze them into our limited physical libraries. Yet when I finish reading something special, I still long to see its face on my shelf. Some of those are scholarly books, or books related to my research interest du jour, but some are just great new books by today’s great contemporary writers. Maybe some enlightened publisher will take advantage of that and offer me a printed copy or bundled digital/print edition for a reasonable premium. I’d buy it! I felt this way after reading David Grossman’s most recent novel on my iPad. I’m really thinking about buying a hardcover copy!
Now if only I could remember the title . . .