Kindling controversy
The popularity of Amazon's Kindle -- and the announcement by the online retailer this week that version 2.0 is around the corner -- is inspiring hosannas about the future of e-reading as well as much fretting about the future of the book. Pessimist Christinae Rosen, writing in the journal New Atlantis, where she's an editor, singles out Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's comment that, because the Kindle allows you to buy texts wirelessly, it "isn't a device, it's a service." For that reason, Rosen writes, the Kindle
is a metaphor for the experience of reading in the twenty-first century. Like so many things we idolize today, it is extraordinarily convenient, technologically sophisticated, consumption-oriented, sterile, and distracting. The Kindle also encourages a kind of utopianism about instant gratification, and a confusion of needs and wants. Do we really need Dickens on demand? Part of the gratification for first readers of Dickens was rooted in the very anticipation they felt waiting for the next installment of his serialized novels … They had time to connect to the story.
But surely if 19th-century serial novels represent the Edenic ideal of reading then we were cast out of the garden long ago. What destroyed the experience of enjoying Dickens in serial form was -- books. Books that contained Dickens' full narratives eliminated the anticipatory delight that Rosen glories in: They provided instant gratification. As do, on a grander scale, bookstores.
Rosen also laments the loss of "the tactile pleasures of the printed page versus the screen." Now I like turning the pages of a book as much as anyone, but I'm suspicious of such aesthetic-sensory claims. They remind me of my least favorite literary genre, first-person essays in which the author revels in the smell of her* pencils and erasers, etc., or the way her library is organized -- fetishism of the accoutrements of reading that miss the point of reading.
Not that my skepticism concerning skepticism means that I am on the side of e-reading's most ecstatic advocates. Harold Augenbraum, on his blog Reading Ahead, writes:
When you read a printed book, you read from the edge to the interior, and then the interior to the edge, again and again and again, a metaphor of immersion (unlike edge to edge reading). And this is the case whether you read left to right or right to left (or even up and down, as do the Chinese, since the sequence of columns moves to the interior). The "frame of reference" becomes the center. The physical act focuses the reading experience. … Is this bad? Only to those of us who grew up with the metaphor of depth and immersion.
I simply don't know what to make of this. Is he talking about research based on eye-tracking? Can you really not immerse yourself in a novel on the Kindle? Is Kant less metaphorically "deep" on-screen? Let me know, Kindle-lovers -- or dabblers who give the device the thumbs-down.
*Feminine pronoun because I have a specific author in mind.
(Photo: Amazon)
