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The digital reader | page 1, 2, 3
The Future of the Book Read also:
Brave new e-books The revolution that wasn't Cassandra complex I've bought Stephen King's new "Riding the Bullet" and an e-book version of Arthur Golden's bestseller "Memoirs of a Geisha," which I wind up finding unengaging. If, by the time I get to page 40 or so in a novel, I discover that I really don't care whether I ever finish it, I usually don't -- and it peeves me that I shelled out $14 for this one. "Riding the Bullet," I discover, is short and not King at his creepy, page-turning best. I start rummaging through the other stuff I downloaded and settle on a collection of G.K. Chesterton essays called "A Miscellany of Men." One of the essays describes how, as a young man, Chesterton once explored a half-built house, writing messages on the wall to its future inhabitant, and then, in middle age, went back to the place and asked if the man he had envisioned was at home. It's a peculiarly confessional piece, and reading it provides me with my first sublime e-book experience. I read it in bed, with all the lights off, the pale rectangle of the screen floating in the darkness over my duvet while Chesterton describes approaching the house at evening, seeing the light shining from the windows and hearing a girl playing the piano and singing inside. The way the darkness isolates the e-book screen mimics the way lighted windows glow in the night, and Chesterton's wistful pursuit of a decades-old whim seems so obliquely revealing that the moment feels intimate in the way the best reading should. I wonder if the personal essay, with its first-person voice, might be the form best suited to the e-book. I also read in public -- on the subway, on buses, in cafes, in bars, in the park and in the gym. I don't read in the bathtub because I'm afraid I'll drop the e-book in the water, and I don't read on the beach because it's March. In general, the darker the surroundings, the easier it is to read. My gym has very bright overhead lights, and the glare off the screen makes reading there somewhat uncomfortable. The fact that I don't have to hold the pages of the book open as I peddle the stationary bike, on the other hand, is a big advantage. Some experts are skeptical about the future of reading devices like the Rocket eBook, and it's not hard to see why. They don't seem to be taking the world by storm. I've never seen anyone else reading one -- in fact, this was the first e-book device I'd ever seen, period. Personal Digital Assistants such as the Palm Pilot are often presented as the chief competitor to e-books. Companies like AvantGo make content (including Salon content) available in formats readable on Palm Pilots -- that's how a lot of people read "Riding the Bullet." I don't use a PDA myself, but I can see why someone who's already forked out between $200 and $300 for a Palm doesn't want to pay the same amount to get a slightly larger and less flexible device just for reading. But the text display on the Palm can't compare to the Rocket eBook's for readability, and the addition of certain features might make the latter more appealing on balance. One of them certainly isn't sound, a feature NuvoMedia touts on its Web site. The Rocket e-book has speakers, but who cares? What would make this gadget far more handy is a wider selection of content. I may be reluctant to buy book-length works in e-book form, but I'd gladly get all my magazine subscriptions (the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, Harper's, the New York Review of Books) in digital form -- no more piles of back issues gathering dust in my living room! And I'd want the full New York Times or I wouldn't want it at all. Other readers will probably lean toward something entirely different -- it's an idiosyncratic market -- so the offerings have to be both wide and deep. Instead of tricking the e-book out in multimedia gewgaws, NuvoMedia should make its information-handling features more powerful. I can get an e-book file containing all the top stories from the New York Times for a particular day, but there's no easy way to set just one of those stories aside. In other words, the technology doesn't support clippings, one of the nice things about print newspapers that ought to be easy to replicate digitally. Endowing e-books with some kind of calendar and address-book capabilities -- not to mention games -- would make them even more appealing. The right price is also key. The miscellaneous people I consulted on this one seemed to agree upon $200; the top-of-the-line model I was using costs $269 from barnesandnoble.com. Will I keep this e-book or not? I still haven't decided. Over the past two weeks it has alternately exasperated and enchanted me, and in the end it may be the way that it makes Salon's content so much more easily accessible to me that decides the matter. That's pretty ironic when you consider that Salon is meant to be read on the screen to begin with, and that the only paper I'll be saving will be from our laser printer. Even I couldn't have predicted that.
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