Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The Condé Nast Traveler site has a blog kept by Mark Schatzker entitled “80 Days or Bust,” which is all about “one man’s attempt to circumnavigate the world the old-fashioned way.” It looks like he completed the trip last week, although I have to say that I don’t agree with the “old fashioned” bit since Magellan didn’t book a ticket on the Queen Mary 2. But what’s really interesting is that for the trip Schatzker, instead of taking a bunch of books along with him, took a Sony eReader loaded with titles. In writing about the experience with the eReader, he sets the stage of the “print is dead” debate perfectly: “Tech reviewers were less than whelmed by the eReader’s feature set — no backlighting, no search, no annotation, no wireless web streaming — and they considered the price, $350, to be way too high. Literary types, on the other hand, dismissed the eReader in a rather haughtier manner. They saw it not only as a poor substitute for a book, but as a threat to the hallowed tradition of ‘the book,’ another broadside from the over-stimulated, attention-deprived, caffeinated present on the deep-thinking and ever-threatened literary tradition.”

And what did he finally decide? “To these arbiters of judgment, I offer a single and uncontestable fact: My 80-day circumnavigation would have been much less pleasurable without my Sony Reader. Thanks to it, I was able to take part — whenever I wanted, and for long, memorable stretches — in one of my most favorite of activities: reading.”

This is, of course, the perfect example of the utility of digital reading. For hundreds of years people going on long trips had to deal with lugging around any number of books (in addition to carrying clothes, food, camera, etc.). But eBooks can finally get rid of all of that. For example, in his short story “The Book-Bag,” W. Somerset Maugham writes about a character who lives in fear of being without appropriate reading material close at hand, especially when on trips: “Since then I have made a point of traveling with the largest sack made for carrying soiled linen and filling it to the brim with books to suit every possible occasion and every mood. It weighs a ton and strong porters reel under its weight. Custom-house officials look at it askance, but recoil from it with consternation when I give them my word that it contains nothing but books. Its inconvenience is that the particular work I suddenly hanker to read is always at the bottom and it is impossible for me to get it.” As Schatzker writes on his blog, “[The eReader] is slender — a mere half-inch thin — and it’s dense. It can hold up to 80 e-books.”

In the future, people will be able to carry one small device that contains dozens (if not hundreds) of books, and the character from Maugham’s story can go back to actually carrying soiled linen in what used to be his “book bag.” And of course what used to “weigh a ton” now weighs less than a pound. I’d say that’s a pretty big achievement.

The Condé Nast Traveler: Gear Review Sony Reader