Last night I attended an author event in San Francisco where Nick Hornby was interviewed by Dave Eggers. Towards the end of the evening, an audience member asked Hornby’s opinion of E-readers. A palpable shudder went through the crowd; you could feel the room waiting and rooting for the bash to come. Hornby went one better, bringing up the new ‘Vook’ debuted by Simon & Schuster earlier this week. The crowd hissed, groaned, booed. It was the kind of reaction that San Franciscans usually reserves for Republican party leaders.
Essentially what the crowd and the speakers agreed on was that there is something negated from the reading experience when you move from a book, which is singularly dedicated to the content at hand, to an electronic device, a more promiscuous format for lack of a better term. Think for example – as Hornby did – of the difference in experience between playing a record and selecting an album to play on an iPod.
Even as a Kindle user, I’ll be the first to agree that consuming content on a Kindle is a much different experience than from reading an actual physical book. In my mind, carrying a book around is the last stand for analog content; I long ago came to think of music and movies as files or folders, but until recently I had never thought that way about books. In a discussion led by Eggers, the founder of an imprint that publishes some of the world’s most physically beautiful books, there is bound to be some bias towards the aesthetic experience of buying, holding and reading a book.
The most striking thing about the Kindle Bestseller list about it is its utter dominance by serial fiction – the stuff you find in supermarkets by popular authors like Janet Evanovich, Richard North Patterson and so forth, plus right-wing screeds by the likes of Glenn Beck and cohorts. What the [ahem] cultural elites fail to understand about these books – the actual physical books – is that they are produced to be the very worst of aesthetic experiences in publishing: poorly bound, grey-papered budget paperbacks. For devotees of these kinds of books, the Kindle actually represents an enormous step up from what they’re given today. It’s not for nothing that Goodwills and St Vincent De Pauls are piled high with mass-market paperbacks selling for a dime each. Nobody wants these when they’re done and there’s no meaningful secondary market. They’re consumed and then they’re trash.
So when a San Francisco crowd starts booing a delivery device for popular fiction because it’s some kind of lowering of their standard of what a book should be, I can’t help but compare it to the same ‘cultural elitism’ that makes it impossible for them to understand the appeal of a George Bush, Fox News, or any mysteriously popular icon of so-called Red State America. E-readers are the most democratic of devices, moving the words and ideas in books out of their hallowed packaging and leveling them for all readers. As Hornby himself discussed, there’s nothing wrong with having books be easy to read and fun for all; it’s the very cornerstone of his considerable success both as novelist and frequent Hollywood adaptee.
There will always be a market for books so long as people crave them as a key aesthetic element of their reading experience. Boutique houses like McSweeney’s may be well prepared where publishing is going: beautiful editions for those who need that experience, just as there continues to be a market for vinyl records for a certain kind of collector. But “Democracy In America,” the kind you find in supermarkets, will increasingly go electronic. Deal with it.
