Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Hardware hacker Igor Skochinsky has cracked open his Kindle — the Amazon eReader that debuted in November — and, as Cnet and other places are reporting, Skochinsky has found a wealth of great features inside. Specifically, he’s found “a basic photo viewer, a minesweeper game, and most interesting, location technology that uses the Kindle’s CDMA networking to pinpoint its position. There also are some basic location-based services that call up a Google Maps view to show where you are and nearby gas stations and restaurants.”

This is all really great stuff, and hopefully the Kindle 2.0 will push these features to the forefront (and maybe even feature yet more stuff). Because this is precisely the kind of functionality that eBook devices need to have in order to be taken seriously. Otherwise, people just look at gadgets like the Kindle and Sony’s eReader and think, “Why spend $400 to read a book, when I can spend $12.95 on a paperback instead?” And so, with the current limitations in terms of features, people can quite rightly claim that there’s not much you can’t do with an eBook you can do with a print book.

Maybe all of this is Apple’s fault. Perhaps eBook makers were too taken with the iPod, and the notion that all it did was play music. Because of this, they thought that all eBook devices had to do was, well, read books. And yet the iPod worked because it did what it did gloriously and beautifully. And — as bibliophiles are constantly pointing out — books are already a near perfect reading experience. Which means that eBooks need to offer a whole lot more than just electronically turning the page, and eBook devices themselves need to offer a whole bunch more than just books. It seems that a lot of this is already lurking inside of the Kindle’s circuit and wires. But Amazon better not wait too long to unveil these features, or else Apple’s going to come along and do it for them.

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.