Reading in the Digital Age

 Ten years ago, almost to the day, a university press published a novel I had written in fits and starts over the previous four years. The editor of the press marveled about the advent of publishing-on-demand and how he submitted an electronic copy to a printer and it stayed that way until physical copies were needed. Always a late adopter of new technology, that sounded like science fiction to me. What I didn’t know then was that paper books of any kind were already in many ways a quaint throwback.

The very first time I heard about electronic books was in the mid 1990s. A professor at a small regional university told me how soon all books would be in electronic format, like on a computer screen. He said he appreciated how converting text to digital format would open new horizons, especially in making scholarly works more widely available than our usual system of interlibrary loan, but he also said after a pause, frown, and a bit of a moan, “But I just like the way books feel.” He held up his hands and continued, “I want to hold them.” This was right about the time that I very first heard of a thing called email and observed how many of my colleagues, fellow graduate students and professors alike, would hurry to the computer center so they could log on to their new email accounts and read messages from people that they could have just as easily called on the telephone or written to via postal mail, except that they probably didn’t have much desire to communicate except via this novel medium. The whole thing seemed just silly to me. I was no stranger to the computer center. I went there almost daily because their laser printer was way, way better than the dot matrix printer I had at home and about a million times faster than the ancient lazy wheel printer the department had dumped in our office area long before I ever arrived. I didn’t need silly email, and I certainly didn’t see a world where books would be read on computer screens any time soon.

Fifteen years later when my novel was published in paperback format and I would mention it to friends or colleagues, the most frequent first question I would encounter was, “Is it an e-book? Can I find it on Amazon?” It was indeed on Amazon, but when I skipped the e-book question and tried to brag about the publishing-on-demand aspect, I encountered overt boredom or polite condescension. I had a new reason to dislike the notion of electronic books, but that wore off momentarily after a few months and I bought a Kindle Reader.

I got the very best one available at the time. I think it was called the Oasis, and I think it cost me about $300. The very first book I purchased was Mark Kurlansky's Paper: Paging Through History. Of course I loved the book, as I had all his previous works I read in hard copy, and I was impressed with the variety of controls on the Kindle device, including the ability to make the screen look like real matte paper, but especially the ability to “invert black and white” and make the text white on a black background, which allowed me to read in the brightest sun or the darkest room.

The novelty of the Kindle Oasis wore off fast when I first noticed that e-books weren’t any cheaper than paper books and when I found that magazines, like my favorites Texas Monthly or The New Yorker, looked downright lousy compared to their glossy paper format. My fascination with e-books and Kindle in particular faded back to a state of near contempt for a few years, and for a time all of my dealings with Amazon were for paper-based books. And then sometime many years after it was old news to the rest of the world, I learned of the Kindle app that could make everything in my Kindle library available to all my devices as well as synching my current reading. That last bit blew my mind. I could read a little bit over breakfast with my Kindle Oasis and then open my Kindle app on my phone during a commute, and the application automatically put me right where I left off.

But what really solidified my appreciation of e-books, and Kindle in particular, were two things: lending libraries and aging eyesight. E-books still haven’t gotten any cheaper on Amazon since I bought that first Kindle Oasis, but somewhere along the way I discovered that my local library also lent books in electronic format. And then I discovered that some libraries in other cities would allow non-residents to hold electronic-only memberships. Many times, if the wait time for a paper-based book was too long I found that I could get an electronic copy immediately and read it on my Kindle, phone, or tablet right away without even leaving home. I was still a little backward or downright stubborn redneckish, depending on your point of view, when it came to preferring paper books over e-books, but that changed when I realized that I didn’t have to worry about print size when it came to e-books. With paper books and my aging eyes that required progressive lenses, I had the choice of forgoing books with especially fine print or insulting my vanity by trying to specially request a large print version. But with an e-book, I can select font size. No more holding books at weird angles. No more headaches. Now my first choice when I become aware of a new title is the electronic format, Kindle if possible.

It took a while for me to fully appreciate e-books. It took a lot less time for me to appreciate email, but these days my thoughts about email are mostly melancholy. No one seems to use it for personal communication anymore. All the cool kids use various other wizardry, and all that stuff to me seems just silly, like email and e-books 30 years ago.