Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

eBooks made an appearance this past Sunday in cartoonist Berkeley Breathed’s latest strip, entitled Opus. Named after the penguin from his ‘80s series Bloom County (why he couldn’t have brought back the Macintosh with feet is beyond me), the recent strip featured Opus getting an eBook for Christmas. The friend who gives it to him tells Opus that “it can download every book ever written,” and then refers to a print book (just as he’s tossing it away) as an “obsolete pile of pressed tree pulp.” The strip then shows Opus, without much luck, trying to read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

Now, not to be too technical, but the reading experience that Breathed portrays is pretty much off the mark and wrong. First of all, the text that Opus is supposedly reading is computery and pixilated in a way that even the Rocket eBook wasn’t a decade ago. Today’s screens offer a much cleaner and clearer reading experience than that. Also, the eBook that Opus is trying to use is backlit. Indeed, the strip shows Opus reading in the dark, his eBook lighting up the entire room (so much so that, by the end of the strip, he’s using it as a night light). This is silly since none of the major eBooks on the market today use backlit screens; everything from the Kindle to the Iliad, not to mention Sony’s device, use eInk displays which quite faithfully mimic the paper reading experience.

Anyway, by the end of the strip — after Opus has been shown reading his horrible eBook in a cold, grey, bare room — he’s finally shown snuggled up in a warm library, curled up in a comfy chair munching on popcorn and reading a paper book. All is suddenly right with the world.

While being not only ridiculous, Breathed’s point is about as subtle as a jackhammer: eBooks bad, paper books good. And not only is this silly and simplistic, but it’s also interesting that the book Opus tries to read is To Kill a Mockingbird. Because I think that eBooks could be quite effectively compared to Boo Radley, the misunderstood character in Lee’s novel.

In the book, Boo Radley is seen by Scout and others as a big creepy monster, a neighborhood ghoul to be feared. Indeed, over the course of the book, Boo Radley is talked about in feared, hushed tones. And currently, eBooks (as evidenced by Breathed’s comic strip, where an eBook is portrayed about as warmly as Hal 9000 in 2001) are seen as cold, scary things: soulless devices whose only wish is to murder books. And yet, in the end, Boo Radley saves Scout, after which everyone discovers that he’s not some awful, Frankenstein-like creature after all. And I think readers will experience a similar epiphany when it comes to eBooks. They’re not something to be feared, but something to be embraced. And as more and more people give them a try, and come to the topic with an open mind, they’ll see that eBooks — long portrayed as the boogeyman by bibliophiles — are simply reading’s next evolution. And there’s nothing to fear in that.