“Listen; there’s a hell of a good universe next door: let’s go.”

– e.e. cummings

1.

I was a teenager when I first discovered the word solipsism. The instant I learned of its meaning I loved the word for its poetic simplicity, silky alliteration, and the fact that a collection of just a few letters could encompass such a big idea. Ever since then, while hopefully never suffering from solipsism (if anything, I usually experience the opposite), I’ve thought of the word from time to time. It also occasionally surfaces in print or conversation, or else a character in a movie will say it. But while we can all hope to eradicate solipsism—so that no one person thinks that they’re the center of the universe—that doesn’t settle the question of the universe itself. After all, what kind of universe has none of us at its center?

2.

It’s been over a year since Print is Dead was first published in paper and electronic formats, and it’s been more three years since I first wrote the original essay that led to the writing of the full-length book. A lot has happened in that time.

Since I wrote the essay, Sony has introduced the first (and then second) version of its eBook reader. In December 2008, Sony reported they’d sold over 300,000 eReader devices, and work continues on yet another version (this time incorporating wireless connectivity). Apple has similarly introduced the iPhone, touted by many in the press as the “God device.” Its sales are already well into the millions and, as of April 2009, more than a billion applications have been download to iPhones around the world. In fact, they’re now so ubiquitous on the streets and on busses and commuter trains that, whenever someone’s cell phone rings, the chances are pretty good that they’re going to pull out an iPhone. In addition to this, Apple has introduced a half-dozen new iPod models (all of them smaller, cheaper, and with larger memories than their predecessors), not to mention Apple has begun selling TV shows, movies, and audiobooks from iTunes. Electronic books—for reading on an iPhone—also appear in iTunes, but so far only clumsily, as stand-alone apps in the app store. Rather than being seen truly as content, books are sold alongside gimmicky fare like video games.

Even in just the last year or so there have been immense changes. Amazon’s Kindle has appeared (with a sleeker 2.0 version already available, as well as a deluxe model with a larger screen), and Google has settled its lawsuit with authors. Meanwhile, more and more people are engaged in the delivery and consumption of electronic content and online participation, getting their news and entertainment from blogs or websites. Recent studies have shown that people spend more time on Facebook than with email, and Twitter is so popular that Ashton Kutcher has more people “following” him than CNN does. Think about that: he’s one person; they’re a news network. In a lot of ways, it’s a pretty amazing time.

However, while digital media continues to proliferate, physical formats are becoming more and more rare. As newspaper circulations continue to shrink, along with advertising income, many American papers are going out of business (to list them all would be too depressing). In addition, a number of magazines—from Domino to Portfolio—have also ceased publication. In the music world, Atlantic Records announced that in November 2008—for the first time—digital sales exceeded physical sales. Everywhere you look, people are creating and consuming electronic content. And, to add insult to injury, the publishing industry experienced a major contraction when the financial system and stock markets collapsed in late 2008. Many prominent New York publishers had layoffs, closed divisions, fired entire departments, and shuttered imprints.

And yet, despite all of this activity, and all of the good and bad news, the universe of publishing—the way that it does business—has not changed all that much in the past year or so. Big books and authors—the James Pattersons and Stephen Kings of the world—continue to rake in big bucks and keep their numerous fans happy. Celebrity authors are still given huge advances (even in these tough financial times), the bestseller lists are filled with the usual suspects, and Twilight has become—more or less—the new Harry Potter. At the same time, publishers in both America and Europe have continued to expand their various digital efforts, digitizing their backlists and embracing new software and reading devices (including the iPhone). But most of this digital activity is happening at the edges of the larger publishing galaxy; eBooks are still only a miniscule profit center, a tiny star against a backdrop of big names and paper formats.

But if publishing is indeed a universe, what kind of universe is it?

3.

For a majority of the twentieth century, there was a debate about what kind of universe we lived in. Was it dynamic and expanding, or static and eternal? Had space always existed, or had it been—at some point in time—created?

Those who feel that the universe is dynamic and expanding believe in the theory of the Big Bang. In this theory, the entire universe was created from a single “primeval atom,” and ever since that initial explosion the universe has continued to grow and expand in all directions (with the galaxies farthest away from our own traveling the fastest).

The other theory, in which the universe is static and eternal, is known as the Steady State Model. According to the proponents of this idea, the universe is infinite in scope; it has always existed, and always will exist.

The difference between the two theories centers, mainly, around the idea of expansion.

Anytime there’s an explosion, debris is hurled in all directions. In the case of our universe, the matter—all of those elements and all of that energy—that burst forth almost 14 billion years ago is still traveling as aftermath of that first blast. Everywhere we look in the night sky, we can see stars and nebulae moving away from us. And while the proponents of a Steady State Model admit that galaxies are indeed moving, they claim this simply means that we’re doubling and tripling our size within infinity (like adding chairs to a table that never ends; there’s room for everyone, no matter how many people show up). Proponents of the Big Bang are sure that this evidence points to a universe being slowly stretched, like taffy; one day, it will snap.

I think that a mini-version of this debate is happening today in publishing. Some people in the industry think that—like the Steady State Model of the universe—publishing is eternal and infinite. No matter what happens at a consumer, business, or even a technological level, publishing will withstand each and every challenge. Indeed, this group believes that—in the future—publishing will continue to exist (and even thrive), looking much the same way that it does now. In this scenario, the dogs bark but the caravan stays right where it is.

At the same time, many others think the opposite: that the publishing universe is expanding; growing in size and venturing into unknown territory. They believe that new business models and ways to sell and experience content are created all of the time, like stars and galaxies born deep inside a fiery nebula. We could call this the Big ‘Berg theory, since Johannes Gutenberg created the publishing industry with his invention of the printing press in 1492. Plus, the fact that the first words ever printed with moveable type happened to be In the beginning makes for a nicely poetic touch.

What makes many people uncomfortable with the Big ‘Berg scenario is that it means that the industry—like the universe—is finite. There’s going to come a time when even James Patterson and Stephen King will supernovae themselves out of existence. When this happens, the entire publishing universe—and everything in it—will cease to exist (except for, probably, Oprah).

However, it’s not quite time to panic. As Alvy Singer’s mom told a young Woody Allen in Annie Hall after he’d been taken to the doctor because of his paralyzing fear of an expanding universe: “You’re here in Brooklyn; Brooklyn is not expanding.” So to just admit that the publishing universe is expanding and changing does not mean that you’re declaring for it an immediate death sentence.

4.

Of course, as persuasive as publishing’s Big ‘Berg theory may be, many people cling to the idea of a Steady State Model for the industry.

They want to believe that publishing has always existed, and always will; that all of the digital activity we’ve witnessed in the last couple of years has been merely a distraction, if not a smokescreen. Yes, people download music, listen to their iPods, and have stopped buying CDs (not to mention magazines and newspapers). The New York Times may be physically shrinking, along with its circulation, but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s a blip, a market correction; a bad spell, a downturn. We’ve had bad times before, seen dark days, but have always bounced back. The shanty towns and Hoovervilles of the ‘20s and ‘30s gave way to the sprawling suburban tract housing of the ‘50s and ‘60s. So why wouldn’t what we’re seeing now, in terms of what’s happening with publishing, be any different?

And just as brilliant scientists like Fred Hoyle had to keep twisting and tuning their Steady State theory to make it comply with the various revelations that were emerging from the realms of physics and astronomy, some publishing pundits continue to resolutely insist on the sanctity of the page, the brilliance of the book. They explain away any digital revolution as mere child’s play. That, they say, could never compete with this. And they come up with various ideas to back up their claim.

For instance, when Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008 and everyone rushed out the next day to buy a newspaper so that they could hang on to it as a keepsake, dozens of articles and blog posts were written from the angle of “See all of this interest in newspapers? That proves that print’s not dead!” And yet, the very opposite was true. People were collecting the newspapers purely as a memento; everyone heard about the election results from either their TV or computer. The newspapers weren’t carrying or relaying news; instead, the newspapers were telling us what we already knew. Collecting them was like bronzing baby shoes straight from the box: an instant keepsake (and a wonderful revenue generator for the newspapers), but hardly a sign that newspapers have a future.

5.

I wrote Print is Dead, at first, just for myself. As someone who had once written novels, but now worked in publishing, I had more than a casual interest in what would happen to books. I was also curious because publishing is what I’d chosen as a career. But I also loved books and wanted to know—even though I was no longer actively trying to create them (it’d been years since I’d written fiction)—what was going to happen to them; were they going to survive all of this craziness surrounding the Web and the iPod? I wrote Print is Dead to answer that question.

Having been an author in the past, I was aware of the various stages of publication: editing the manuscript, correcting the galleys, getting a few good reviews, getting some bad ones (not getting any reviews). But what was different this time from any other time I’d published a book was the presence of the blogosphere. Before the Web, whenever anyone’s book appeared, it was the critics and the mainstream media who had the power to make or break an author or a book. But now, there’s a whole new online world that has the power to either amplify a book’s message or else an author’s profile. 

Print is Dead received very few reviews (a couple appeared in England, the majority of which were derisive). Needless to say, the bad reviews seem to have come from those who believe in the Steady State Model of publishing; all of this digital noise is just that: noise. Computers are for kids; books are amazing technology, they’ll never be replaced. No one I know reads electronic books. Blah blah blah.

There was also scant notice of my book in any mainstream publications, and when The Los Angeles Times recommended Print is Dead as a fall book, I could only be bemused since they mentioned it as a fall book for 2008 (even though the book came out in the fall of 2007; better late than never, I guess). Of course, every author has these gripes. But still, I would have thought that print publications would have been interested in the subject matter, if only to defend their honor and denounce me and my ideas. Instead, there was mostly silence. Even within the publishing industry itself, there was mostly indifference; Publisher’s Weekly invited me to write something for their Soap Box column, but never wrote a review of the book itself.

The blogosphere was a different story. Dozens of bloggers wrote about Print is Dead, and for months after the book came out my RSS feed was filled with various mentions and links. Plus, people from all over the world reached out to me, asking questions, wanting clarification on a point, or just to say that they’d liked it. Also, the fact that I continued to blog about the book and the topic helped increase exposure for me and my book.

Because of this—the dearth of reviews, and lack of any marketing—I was pleasantly surprised when the book actually sold, and went into a second edition. That being said, the book wasn’t successful enough that my publisher is allowing me to update or correct the text, not to mention add a new introduction (which is why this essay is appearing here, and not there). I would have loved to have updated the text, if only to fix the numerous typos that appeared due to the fact that the book was rushed into publication (the fact that I managed to misspell schadenfreude is a shame I won’t ever live down, even though it seems like a dare to someone to point it out). Somehow, my little book managed to do okay, and I’m pleased and surprised to see it getting a second life in paperback.

Of course, what’s also happened since the release of Print is Dead is that there have been another dozen or so breathless odes on the greatness of books, appearing in various magazines and publications, with writers once again pining for pages and denigrating digital. These kinds of articles go back at least a decade, if not to E. Annie Proulx’s original proclamation in 1994 that, “Nobody is going to sit down and read a book on a twitchy little screen. Ever.”

One of the more recent articles—and one that attracted a lot of attention—was an op-ed piece in The New York Times by Faster author James Gleick. Entitled, “How to Publish Without Perishing,” it offered up yet more advice to publishers on how they can survive in a digital world. However, Gleick’s ideas are counterintuitive if not downright archaic. Instead of pushing publishers to digitize their backlists, or explore new business models, he exhorts them to, “Go back to an old-fashioned idea.” The idea being to, well, publish books. Why? Because, as Gleick states, “We’ve reached a shining moment for this ancient technology.” (I think the glare from that “shining moment” has gotten into his eyes and is obscuring his vision.)

The artwork that appeared alongside Gleick’s story said a lot about the mistake of his argument. In the illustration a man, standing in a library amidst stacks and shelves of bound volumes, is intently reading a book. Meanwhile, a glowing computer screen sits impotently on a desk, slowly loading information (as if desperately trying to catch up to all of the knowledge already accumulated in the room). In the picture—as in Gleick’s article—books are a superior technology to computers. This idea is the familiar twisting of Orwell’s words that I find commentators come to time and time again (whether they’re conscious of the connection or not): computers good, books better.

What’s so silly about that picture, and arguments like the one Gleick is making in his op-ed, is that it frames the debate over reading to be a steal-cage death match between a laptop and a paperback. Sure, when faced with a choice between the page or a computer screen, most would rather read something on paper (even something as quotidian as e-mail; I know plenty of people who print out e-mails and read them like memos). But most consumers aren’t faced with that either/or decision. Instead, what we talk about when we talk about electronic reading is, in most cases, the screen as a substitution for nothing at all.

6.

When I’m at home, I rarely listen to my iPod. Instead, I load up my CD player with various discs, choosing from a spindle that holds about fifty or so and permanently lives inside the cabinet that houses my stereo, cable box, and DVD player. That stack of CDs encompasses recent purchases, longtime favorites, and a selection of moods I’m liable to find myself in (jazz for reading, electronica for quiet contemplation, singer-songwriters for Sunday mornings, etc.). And if I get a particular craving to hear a certain record—because a fellow commuter was talking about Blur that morning on the bus, or “Maps” was seeping through a co-worker’s white earbud headphones on the elevator in my office building—then I’ll dig that specific CD out of my stacks.

But it’d be ridiculous to extrapolate from this behavior, and say that a physical format is better than an electronic format because I don’t listen to my iPod when I’m surrounded at home by my CDs. Instead, that’s simply my behavior when I’m at home, under those conditions. When I have the time and chance (and luxury) to utilize a physical format, I do. But that’s hardly a victory for physical formats since there are plenty of times—even while I’m at home—when I eschew the physical for the ether of digital.

And, of course, whenever I’m not at home—whether it’s on a long trip or just during my daily commute, or when I’m at the gym or even going to the store for a carton of milk—I’m listening to my iPod. Why? Well, because carrying one iPod that holds over 20,000 songs is much more handy than being followed around with a U-Haul carrying a stereo and thousands of my CDs. And yet, in terms of the digital versus analog debate, it’s still not an either/or proposition. Instead, one format fills in when it makes sense for it to do so. We need to stop positioning this argument—with apologies to the ghost of William Styron—as Sophie’s Choice, and treat it more like tag-team wrestling.

The same goes for books and general online reading. Give someone a print edition of The New York Times, along with a Kindle loaded with the same stories, and most people would prefer to read the physical newspaper. That preference is practically hardwired in our brains; the Kindle is a gadget, a newspaper is gospel.

However, give someone a choice between a laptop with an Internet connection or a physical copy of The New York Times. Most people would choose the laptop. They would choose the computer because, with it, they would get not only the Times but also the entirety of the Web: e-mail, Youtube, Google, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter. (Plus, the online version of The New York Times has audio, video, up-to-the-minute news, and reader’s comments). Not only is that a win for the laptop, but it can hardly be considered a fair fight.

True, many people—since it’s not an either/or decision—choose to read both the newspaper and the screen (opting for the paper at home, over breakfast, and then surfing the Web at the office). But for many, many more—people who either do not have access to printed material or physical formats—they spend their time solely with digital content. Therefore, that illustration for Gleick’s op-ed would only be credible if everyone’s home, office, dorm, car, or escalator at the mall, were lined with all of those books. But, of course, we don’t live in a world where we’re tripping over free books every step that we walk. However, electronic content is indeed reaching us at all of those points where books cannot.

At the center of all this media—of all of this content—we stand with our various screens: laptops, iPhones, PDAs, etc. These devices can call up any nugget of the world’s vast store of knowledge, or else just flash your favorite photo. They are portals to the past, and windows into the future. Satellites (almost like planets) orbit each of us in order to beam into our hands headlines, music, movies, and—yes—even books. The potential now exists to have, at your fingertips (and at your request), almost anything you’d want to know, have or experience. In an instant. It’s enough to make someone feel a little, well, solipsistic. 

Print is Dead will be coming out early next year in a paperback edition. The new cover is pictured above. While there won’t be any new material included, I will be writing a new introduction that I’ll post to this blog when the paperback appears. I will also make this material available for download.

Thanks.

–Jeff

The website Boy Genius Report has shots of the new version of Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader. And while the device continues to look sleek and cool (though it’s still not quite in iPod territory), the screen is remains black and white; or rather, slate-grey and dirty-ivory. It also doesn’t seem to be a touch-screen, which — if they couldn’t do color, they should have offered — the newly announced Sony device will indeed have.

I find it a little strange that the Kindle seems to have gotten bigger, rather than smaller. I guess Amazon’s trying not to compete with the smaller form-factor of things like iPhones and Android phones. Instead, with its magazine and newspaper subscriptions (not to mention the ability to read blogs), Amazon’s going more for a tablet experience than the stick-it-in-your-pocket convenience of a paperback.

More photos here.

There’s a long cover story this week in New York Magazine about publishing. Rather than leave any doubt as to the future of the book industry, the article is called “The End.” And while movies in the thirties and forties were never complete without those two words appearing in the final reel — those six letters giving cathartic closure and making us eager for yet more stories — what writer Boris Kachka seems to be saying with his piece is that not only is our movie over, but there won’t be a sequel. Time to leave the theater. Go home. Stick a fork in publishing; it’s done. Don’t believe me? Here’s the subheadline:

The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world.

And yet, even though I wrote a book called Print is Dead, even I don’t think that publishing is over. Rather, it just needs to change and be willing to embrace new ideas and business models. And while the challenges the industry faces are indeed difficult, they’re hardly insurmountable. Kachka himself points to a few hopeful enterprises (HarperStudio, the Kindle) but, for the most part, the article is more of the usual.

The New York Times reported today on Google’s newspaper scanning efforts:

Google has begun scanning microfilm from some newspapers’ historic archives to make them searchable online, first through Google News and eventually on the papers’ own Web sites…

Google will then serve up scans of newspapers either via Google, or on the site of the originating newspapers, which provides income for Google (in the first example) and/or traffic and visitors (and potentially income from advertising) for the original newspapers (in the second example).

And while Google got in hot water with its book-scanning program a few years ago, touching on raw nerves and igniting a debate about copyright, the newspaper initiative seems like a better idea. Because a July 21st issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1969 is a different kind of content from the novel The Godfather (which was published that same year). The novel is available from retailers, and is making money for its publisher and author. Whereas the newspaper is a quietly fading artifact, an orphaned antique not likely to find a foster home.  And that’s a shame since, in terms of being a sort of fossil record of our national identity, newspapers can be more valuable than books: a great novel has the ability to reflect our common hopes and dreams, but almost any old newspaper is an indispensable record of the quotidian details that make up our everyday lives.

Two years ago I posted the first entry to the Print is Dead blog; I’m not sure if that makes today a birthday or an anniversary (it’s probably neither and a bit of both). But as you can see from the above I went with candles as a graphic, so let’s call it a birthday.

I created the blog in the summer of 2006, just as I was finalizing a deal to write the book Print is Dead (which was itself an expansion of a 50 page essay I’d written and distributed privately to a few friends and colleagues that winter and spring). Initially I just wanted the blog to be a place where I could post, and thus have record of, articles that I’d read or come across concerning the future of the book debate. Because, at that point, I was still just sort of getting my head around the subject: compiling books to read, printing out articles for research, trying to learn everything I could.

It also seemed that every other day I was coming across something that was relevant to the topic and my argument, items and ideas that I was going to want to include somehow in the text. So rather than just printing out Web pages and sticking them in a folder, or even bookmarking the sites so I could visit them later, I wanted to post them as blog entries with links and a bit of commentary (mainly as a way of putting the link into some sort of context). Plus, it forced me think about my topic on a daily basis.

Looking back, it’s interesting for me to see how the posts evolved; how they got longer, became a bit more involved and, hopefully, more thought-out and precise. For instance, here’s a short post from 2006 about The Nation writing about newspapers. Here’s a longer article about a similar Nation article written two years later.

Bill Griffith, the creator of Zippy the Pinhead, wrote that “Comics is a language. It’s a language most people understand intuitively.” Blogs also have their own language, rhythm, and rules, and it certainly took me a while to discover that language. Plus, blogs have their own form.

A blog post is one long unraveling of prose; a digital version, almost, of Kerouac’s On the Road scroll. And so, the more I got into the language and format of blogging, the more I would write the posts with careful attention to the length of the paragraphs. I always kept in mind the fact that the reader would be reading my words in a continuous flow rather than divided into pages. This is similar to what musicians are up against; they now sequence records as one continuous program (for CD, if not download) instead of in two different halves for vinyl or cassette.

For a non-fiction book, the blog was a huge help in getting down, in a permanent way, my thoughts on my subject. What’s also interesting to me is that, because I was blogging as I wrote the book, some of the material I wrote as posts eventually made it into the finished draft. Of course, I’m not the first author to do this; many others have done this already and, I suspect, lots of writers are doing this right now.

I remember reading, years ago, Martin Amis saying that the computer scared him, and that he liked to write in longhand because once something was written down he could always return to it. Whereas, once something digital is virtually erased or deleted, it’s long gone. However, a blog also allows you to sort through all of its entries, as well as tag entries by content or topic; a moleskin journal or yellow legal pad will never let you do that.

Also, getting comments and reader feedback was great. I was most happy when a discussion would start because of something I wrote. As a writer you can only hope that people read, or think critically, about your work. With a physical book, you know if they bought it but not if they read it (not mention whether or not it’s being discussed). But a blog gives you a real window into that process: people can interact with you and your material almost immediately. Sometimes that’s a scary prospect, and sometimes it’s not fun, but it’s almost always worthwhile.

I think the most valuable lesson I learned from keeping this blog — and how it pertains to my subject — is that it indeed reinforced in me (or else reintroduced) the prejudice that people feel towards screens. We revere the page, but we take the screen for granted. As Jonathan Franzen recently said in an interview, “If there’s great fiction getting published online, I look forward to seeing it in print someday soon.” E-mail, stock quotes and porn are displayed on screens; literature, love letters and ideas are printed on the page. And I fell into this trap myself.  Because, at times, I would find myself — when trying to get a sentence or an argument right when writing up an entry — think to myself, “Oh, hell, just post it; it’s only a blog.”

So there’s certainly something to the idea that the screen is not as permanent as the page. Or rather, it’s that a blog — or anything electronic, really — is not yet a final draft. Because if I know that I can log on later and make a change (apostrophe here, comma there), then why sweat every word now? People like Harold Brodkey labored over every word in their prose because they believed books were real and final things; he may have been writing on a typewriter, but in his mind he was chiseling words into stone for all eternity. Whereas today we see software — from Word to Wordpress — as being a mixture of training wheels and a safety net: there’s always the ability to edit, undo, or “revert to saved.”

And yet, I would say that it’s actually the opposite. The screen can be much more permanent than the page ever was. Once something’s online it’s scooped, crawled, indexed, and cached, and from that point on it can be awfully hard to get rid of. After all, it’s easier to buy a portable hard drive with every single issue of The New Yorker on it than to try and collect — let alone store — all of the print editions (if you could even find them). One day entire libraries — both personal and public collections — will come on Flash drives that will fit on your key chain. And when we get to that point, with all of that content accessible by and available on an electronic device, we’ll finally see that screens can be both sandbox and concrete.

Anyway, my thanks to everyone who reads, writes about, or links to this blog.

In Print is Dead, in the chapter about eBooks, I describe how we usually find fault with science fiction books and movies:

In every book or film or piece of art from the last century that has depicted the future – from Jules Verne to George Lucas – we usually fault it twice: first for the things that didn’t come true, and then for failing to see the myriad of changes that did take place.

But last week, as I read The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick, I was struck by a few passages that seemed to almost perfectly portray aspects of our current digital age.

Published in 1981, The Divine Invasion is part of Dick’s VALIS trilogy. Comprising the last three novels published before Dick’s untimely death at the age of 53, the books were based on a religious experience that Dick had in 1974 when he felt he was zapped by a pink laser that he believed was extraterrestrial in origin.

At one point in The Divine Invasion, a character named Emmanuel (who is actually God in the body of a child) is given an electronic device at his school. Called an “information slate,” the gadget sounds an awful lot like either an eBook device or a Tablet PC. Made by I.B.M. (which, in the future, is part of the government), Dick describes each slate as having a “pale gray surface” and containing “common microcircuitry” (which makes it sort of seem like a Kindle). Each student is given one, and each device is “plugged into the school” (which sounds a lot like either an intranet if not the Internet). Plus, the fact that every child gets one reminded me of this story from last week in The New York Times about how colleges are handing out iPods to freshman. The slates quiz the students, answering questions and giving out information.

In the early ‘80s — at the dawn of the computer revolution — this could have easily been imagined. The slates Dick describes sound a bit like an expansion of any number of gizmos that existed back then, even my beloved Dataman that I had in elementary school. The big difference is that none of those devices were networked with other devices (the closest I came to that was my Coleco Head-to-Head Football). More interesting than this is a description a few pages later about a holographic (and thus obviously electronic) version of the Bible:

…the Bible expressed as layers at different depths within the hologram, each layer according to age. The total structure of Scripture formed, then, a three-dimensional cosmos that could be viewed from any angle and its contents read. According to the title of the axis of observation, different messages could be extracted. Thus Scripture yielded up an infinitude of knowledge that ceaselessly changed. It became a wondrous work of art, beautiful to the eye, and incredible in its pulsations of color.

This is a pretty wonderful description, and it kind of reminds me of the online version of Gamer Theory from last year where each paragraph had a graphical and color-coded representation on the screen. If that website were able to be portrayed in 3D, and was accessed on something like an iPhone, where you could flip through its layers and turn it over and around with your fingers, then you’d be close to experiencing what Dick had envisioned.

But even more interesting than even this is that, a decade before the birth of anything resembling the Internet that we know today, and twenty years before the birth of Wikipedia, Dick writes about a kind of Creative Commons online version of the Bible, a living document which anyone can add to.

As the narrator describes:

It was an open hologram. New information could be fed into it. Emmanuel wondered about that, but he said nothing…

What he could do, however, was type out on the keyboard linked to the hologram a few crucial words of Scripture, whereupon the hologram would align itself from the vantage point of the citation, along all its spacial axes. Thus the entire text of the Bible would be focused in a relationship to the typed-out information.

Emmanuel, being God, of course has a few things to add to the Bible. However, he resists the temptation:

He wanted to feed that into the hologram of the Bible, as an addendum, but he knew that he should not. How would it alter the total hologram? he wondered. To add to the Torah that God enjoys joyful sport … Strange, he thought, that I can’t add that. Someone must add it; it has to be there, in Scripture. Someday.

In an age of living documents, and the constant updating of blogs, the day of people correcting and adding content to websites is today. Too bad Philip K. Dick isn’t alive to see it.

Reading blogs and newspapers on the Kindle felt strange to me, whereas — after some initial trepidation — reading a book did not. Maybe it’s because the Kindle really does feel like the next step in the evolution of reading: words started out on the page, and now they’re migrating to the screen. Whereas reading a blog on a Kindle felt like a distinct step backwards. Because blogs are constantly updated, hyperlinked, are in color, and — more and more these days — feature video and audio. So while blogs, and certainly newspapers, began as just words, increasingly they consist of a variety of media, none of which make it to your Kindle (even photos really don’t look very good).

In fact, to me it felt like the reverse of the page/screen evolution; sort of like taking something 3D and turning it into 2D. That being said, when I was on a recent trip I was more glad than not to being able to download a few of my favorite blogs. Reading The Huffington Post on an airplane was a pretty cool experience, but it was also frustrating not to be able to hop from link to link, or to be able to click through to original stories the blog posts were sometimes commenting on.

Also, something that frustrated me about the blog process, and that again seems like a step backwards rather than forward, is that the Kindle seems to treat a blog like it’s a newspaper. It seems that, once a day, it “publishes” the blog, and sends it out to devices the same way a copy of The New York Times lands on your front door courtesy of the paperboy. As someone who reads a dozen blogs, and checks his RSS reader for updates throughout the day, the idea of a blog being a static thing makes no sense.

Instead of being pushed out to subscribers once a day, I don’t know why the Kindle version of a blog can’t constantly refresh and update itself (as long as the wireless signal is on, of course). Also, it’s jarring if you’re keeping track of the blog using both the Kindle and a computer. While I was traveling I would wake up and read my blogs and websites and then later, when I was on a plane, I would get out the Kindle and sync it up and want to read what I’d missed since packing my computer away. Instead, what I got on my Kindle was literally yesterday’s news. I had the same experience with reading a newspaper on the Kindle.

Even though newspapers have traditionally been thought of as static objects, something that’s delivered once a day, in the Internet age newspapers have become more like constantly updating stock tickers that deliver news and events as they happen. In fact, I check The New York Times website several times a day, the same way I check Daily Kos, because I know that the Times — online, anyway — will have fresh content throughout the day. But on the Kindle, the same as blogs, you get a static edition of a newspaper (presumably the same content that’s in the printed edition). And rather than the Kindle searching out the latest stories every time you turn on the wireless signal, what you get are day-by-day editions. And I don’t want to read newspapers on a Kindle; I want to read news.

The Kindle’s digital menu listing the dates of different editions of The New York Times is just a digital version of the clutter that I find in my living room after a few days of collecting the real thing. Instead of this, the blogs and newspapers I subscribe to should be singular entities that constantly update and change, the same as their online counterparts. The fact that this isn’t the case betrays the notion of the Kindle being a never-ending source of always and instantly replenished content; instead of the screen being a true portal, the device itself is just a vault.

However, I will say that reading the newspaper on a Kindle is a better experience than reading it online. For instance, it was really easy to navigate through a Sunday edition of The New York Times on the Kindle (if you know what sections you like; browsing through ALL of the stories is a chore), whereas I find that poking around on the website on a Sunday is a bit difficult. And while I still read the physical edition of the Times on the weekends (mainly because it’s too difficult to sit on a couch with a laptop while eating bagels), now that I have a Kindle I may finally cancel that subscription once and for all.

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.

As I wrote in a previous post, I now own an Amazon Kindle and have been using it for the past couple of weeks.

In terms of the device itself, it’s very light and sleek (without, that is, the cover). The cover, I think, tries to make the Kindle look/feel like it’s either a moleskin journal or a hardback book, and yet it’s neither.

Once free of the cover, the Kindle feels great to hold is more than comfortable to read with one hand (either one). Plus, turning the page with the tip of a finger, or thumb, of the hand you’re holding the device with is a cinch. I had perfected how to do this with paperbacks years ago — in my pre iPod days — when I lived in Manhattan and would read on the subways during my commute, always having to hold onto my book with one hand and the subway pole with the other. I’m glad to see that the skill is again coming in handy.

However, as comfortable as the device feels in the hand, the “page” (meaning, the screen), rather than being truly white, is a kind of non-fat milk gray. In fact, since it’s contrasted with the matte white of the Kindle itself, the screen looks even grayer than it probably is. True, I’ve read plenty of books in my time that were printed on cheap, almost newsprint paper, which was both coarse to the touch and hardly white, so I’m hardly expecting the screen to be bone-white. But the “slate gray Victorian sky” tone of the Kindle screen doesn’t at all match the ultra crisp resolution found either an iPhone or a Pocket PC. And, at times, I find this to be a distraction.

In terms of how words look on the screen, I thought they looked great; text is very easy to read, and I didn’t mind having to have light in order to see the screen (since it’s not backlit, like a Blackberry or iPod). And changing the font size is really easy, and something I did often (like, at night — if I’m tired — I’ll make the font bigger and easier to read). But I also kept wanting to change the font itself. Why not offer a number of different fonts to choose from? That should be a setting the consumer can change as easily as the size of the font.

Another display issue that bothered me was the “ghosting” of the type: the fact that the words from the previous page seem to sort of hover on the screen even after you’ve changed the page. This makes the Kindle perennially feel like an old monitor with a Windows logo burned into the screen. I realize that this is an inherent design element/flaw with the eInk technology, and isn’t really the fault of the Kindle itself, but for me it’s a bit of a distraction. Is there really no getting rid of this?

One thing that I don’t mind about the Kindle is that it’s an extra device. I used to think that I wanted an integrated device — one thing that did everything — and that I wouldn’t want to carry around yet another device or gadget. But I actually like the fact that the Kindle is (more or less) just a device for the reading of content. Maybe this harkens back to the fact that every book is a destination; you get into bed and pick up a book because you want to read. You don’t pick up a book to take pictures, record video or get your voicemail. So the fact that I don’t use the Kindle to play solitaire is fine with me. True, that means I can’t read something if I leave the house and have just my cell phone in my back pocket. But then again, a cell phone screen is too small, and most books are too big, so carrying a Kindle seems the right compromise.

Besides, I tend to get weary when it comes to loading down devices with too many uses and bits of software; sooner or later, it’s going to get overloaded and crash. Or else the device will get so far removed from its original purpose that it’ll end up doing two things poorly instead of excelling at one (this reminds me of the New Yorker cartoon where a disgruntled customer in a bookstore says to a sales person, “No caffe latte? And you call yourself a bookstore?”). I’m starting to see this with the iPhone and iTouch. People are going crazy for the all of those applications, but each one (not to mention the music videos, movies and TV shows that iTunes now sells), is taking precious bits of memory. I have a 16GB iPod iTouch, and 18,000 songs on my computer at home. The last thing in the world I’m going to do is have half a dozen silly applications on my iPod that take away from my music collection (more Captain Beefheart, less Crash Bandicoot). It doesn’t make much sense to me to carry around an iPod and have it be PSP. So when it comes to storing books and text — for now — I’m fine carrying around a specialized device.