Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Andrew Marr, writing on the Guardian website, has an essay entitled “Curling up with a good ebook.” The premise of the essay is that Marr, “who treasures his smelly, beautiful library of real books,” will spend a month reading on an ebook. From the outset Marr is — like lots of readers — skeptical: “If you are selling ebooks, I’m a hard sell. For one thing, my enthusiasm for traditional books is just this side of pervy. I live among mountains of them and always have, among the most beautiful mass-produced objects of all time.” And so even though Marr is an unabashed lover of books, even from a technical point of view (“books are such good technology, even compared with CDs or newspapers”), even he sees utility in electronic reading, and books existing as invisible computer files rather than physical things: “In our house, every day we get mounds of newsprint, much of it thrown instantly away. The stuff hangs around like intellectual scurf, and it’s depressing.”

For the experience, Marr is using an English eBook reader named the Illiad — similar to the Sony eReader — loaded with classics. He starts by taking the device to a number of locations, “reading some Tolstoy and then some Conan Doyle, in the garden, slumped in a chair inside, on a sofa in a dimmish room, and in the back of a car.” To his surprise, reading text on a screen is not as bad as he thinks: “In each place, it was easy to read; I have spent plenty of time reading it and so far, haven’t felt any eyestrain, or no more than I would have found with a book.” In fact, there’s an accompanying photo that shows Marr actually curling up quite comfortably with his eBook (in a manner that most critics say is impossible). After a few weeks, Marr is pleased by the experience: “I was surprised by how easy it was to use, and surprised by how much can be stored on it. I liked the rather elegant, retro design, more like a digital slate than a piece of flashy gear…” And even though Marr still has some issues, notably price and the experience of turning “pages,” in the end, Marr remarks, “I am reluctantly impressed with my ebook.”

All of which goes to show that if electronic reading can win over a bibliophile like this, then perhaps eBooks have a chance after all.

The Guardian: Curling up with a good ebook