The Kindle Swindle

I know that many, many people have observed that all books and articles tend to look the same on the screen of an iPhone or Kindle or on the Kindle app of the iPad, and this strips the reading experience of texture?the array of sensory experiences that have come to be represented as the "book smell." This has become such a cliché by writers nostalgic for the simpler, more book-smell-redolent past that some humorist has even invented a fictitious aerosol spray, "for sale" at smellofbooks.com, that purports to allow readers to "finally enjoy reading e-books without giving up the smell you love so much."

In the introduction to the 2006 edition of his prescient 1994 essay collection The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts summed up the deeper concern that those superficial aesthetic concerns stand in for: "The electronic impulse works against the durational reverie of reading. And however much other media take up the slack ... what is lost is the contemplative register. And this, in the chain of consequences, alters subjectivity, dissipates its intensity." In other words, what's at stake when we lose the book-specific experience of reading isn't just the emotional connection to the book or magazine as an object; we've redefined what reading is. The consequences of this redefinition can be positive, negative, or indifferent.  I set out to experience and describe device-reading with this set of concerns in mind, as someone who loves reading on, and writing for, both page and screen, but worries a lot about the growing primacy of the latter. 

The iPad and its brothers will never completely succeed in replicating the experience of reading a book, and that's fine: that's what books are for, and will continue to be for. What we need is?I hesitate to write the word, but there seems to be no substitute for it in this context?"content" that is actually tailored to the medium from which it will be consumed.  And for examples of how a medium can shape media, for better and for worse, we need only look to the Internet.

Looking to the Internet is what I haven't been doing lately. A few months ago?so, very belatedly?I became aware that the kind of mental rhythms that online reading and writing evoke and celebrate were inimical to the kind of work I'm trying to do.  (I'm working on a novel.) This won't be the kind of essay where the author has just discovered that the Internet is bad and that microblogging platforms are designed to be maximally addictive and that the only way to live a good, pure, intellectually whole-wheatish lifestyle is to abstain from rolling around in the Internet's glittering piles of trash and candy. (I have written that essay a weirdly huge number of times, and often in the form of blog posts.) But while I may not have been reading much online lately, like Jaron Lanier, the virtual reality impresario and author of the manifesto You Are Not a Gadget, I acknowledge that the Internet has excellent bright spots, without crediting it for being a semi-magical repository for all the world's knowledge and creativity. Also like Lanier, I think it's too bad that the infrastructure of most blogging and social media platforms devalues authorship and privileges semi-anonymous, consequence-free collaboration. But I also value blog writing on its own terms.

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