Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The first book I read on the Kindle was David McCullough’s 1776 (which I wanted to read because of the recent 4th of July holiday). And I must say that it never felt weird to be reading about the 18th century on an electronic device that would have appeared to George Washington as the work of men from outer space. In fact, I can imagine using the Kindle to read anyone from Tom Wolfe to Thomas Wolfe without it feeling either out of context or just plain wrong. (The only kind of writing that depends on its placement on the page — and thus would lose some of its punch in a reflowable format — is poetry). However, initially it did indeed feel a little funny to read a book on a computer screen; it involved subtly fighting against decades of learning.

I associate words with pages (the same way that I similarly associate small computer screens with content like e-mail, text messages and my iPod). So to mash the two together was, at first, a strange experience. It reminded me of the scene in Wall-E where the robot, after coming back from a day of smashing garbage and collecting treasures, has a spork (half spoon, half fork). He goes to add it to his collection, but he can’t decide whether to add it to his jumble of spoons or his haystack of forks. Instead, since this is a new hybrid of them both, he places the spork to the side (and, I guess, a new collection — and a new way of looking at utensils — begins). This example, as silly as it might seem, I think has real relevance to the future of the book debate. Because people insist on seeing books as books, and computer content as computer content, and yet eBooks are truly a mixture of the two in order to create something new.

As I started to really get into the book, the way the words appeared on the screen felt sort of magical. It was as if each time I “turned the page” I was shaking up a magic eight ball, with the words then lazily floating to the surface. The screen seemed to be like an Etch-A-Sketch, the screen a blank surface constantly filled and then erased, filled and then erased.

And yet all of the old behavior was there. Whereas, with a print book I’ll occasionally flip forward a few pages to see if the chapter I’m reading is about to end — searching for a good stopping point before I go to bed — with the Kindle I would do the same thing, hitting Next Page a few times to see if there was a natural break in the prose.

The only thing that was a little odd was that I never really knew where I was in the story. In print books progress is easy to tell because every night you gain satisfaction in looking at how many pages you’ve managed the get through. But reading an electronic book is like being on a treadmill; yes, you’re absorbing the content, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re not just running in place, going nowhere.

Yes, there are a series of dots at the bottom of that screen that show where you are in the story, but those dots can be misleading. The book I was reading was a non-fiction book, with a lot of endnotes (which, in a print edition, would take up a lot of pages at the back of book). And when I glanced down at the dots at the bottom of the screen at one point, which showed I was about three-fourths through the book, I thought I was three-fourths through the story. So I was a bit shocked when the story suddenly ended, and all of those remaining dots were representing content I didn’t want to read. This wouldn’t have happened in a print book.

You crack the spine of a book when you first start to read it the same way you crack your knuckles before you start a task you know will be a challenge. And when you do this — or at least, when I do this — I flip ahead to see how long the book is, to see what I’m up against. I’ve often felt daunted when reading the opening sentence of either a very long or multi-volume work (“For a long time I used to go to bed early”), gulping as I began my long climb up all of those words. And yet, none of that exists in an electronic format because eBooks are like icebergs: the words we see on the surface are not representative of how many of them are lurking below. This phenomenon essentially turns books into movies, because you know when a movie’s going to begin but you never know when it’s going to end. This is both good and bad.

Endings in movies can sneak up on you, which give them immense power. Think of last scenes of something like Birdy, Memento or even the more recent There Will Be Blood. Endings like those come out of nowhere, and can pack a wallop. Then again, not knowing when a movie will end can lead to peering at your watch in the dark, wondering when in the hell it will be over. I remember, in high school, being in a theater watching Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and just hating it. Every time a scene faded out I hoped it would be the end of the movie, and I was disappointed a dozen times when the screen faded in with yet more scenes. In a book, this is not the case.

We see the end of a book coming from pages away. In fact, sometimes the hardest thing to do, when you have only two or three pages left of a book, is to not go to the very last line and read it. The end is so close, and you want to get there so badly, that the temptation to take a quick glance is sometimes overpowering. On a Kindle, this is much more difficult. The pages are virtual, and you’re only being served up one page at a time (with not much of an idea of how that screen fits into the rest), so it’s like driving at night and not being able to see much past your headlights. For some people, this will seem a thrill; for others, it may seem a bit claustrophobic.