The Book Is Dead; Long Live the Book

The Sony Reader, a new e-book device released just in time for the holiday shopping season, doesn' t look too different from all the other gadgets that clutter our briefcases and backpacks. The sleek black plastic case, the flat gray screen, and the miniature buttons make it resemble a Palm Pilot's big boned cousin. But the reader has gotten more attention from journalists than the usual new gadget, and for good reason: It is the canary in the mine shaft of the post-Gutenberg age. It brings us one step closer to the day, long prophesied and long postponed, when the old-fashioned book will finally be obsolete.

Compared to the iPod and the BlackBerry, however, the Reader is actually a highly conservative technology. Unlike earlier generations of e-book readers, which were really just portable computer screens, the Sony Reader used "E Ink," a technology based on microcapsules that are polarized to appear black or white. The result is a screen that does not flicker, and can be read at any angle and in any kind of light. In short, as Sony puts it, the Reader offers "a reading experience that's similar to paper." It may sell for $349, weigh nine ounces, and have a memory that can store eighty books, but the Reader's main selling point is that it doesn't look too different from the printed books it means to replace.

After spending a week with the Reader, using it to browse through bestsellers like "Freakonomics" and classics like "Pride and Prejudice," that easily readable screen does strike me as the device's major attraction. You can look at a page for as long as you need to without strain, and the contrast of black text on white background is muted and appealing to the eye. I look forward to the day when computer monitors use the same technology: It would make wordprocessing and Web-browsing much more pleasant experiences.

Unfortunately, the screen is the only impressive thing about the Sony Reader. Instead of embracing the interactive potential of virtual reading, the device aims for complete passivity: Using the Reader means paging through a text one screen at a time, as if you were turning the leaves of a book. Pages are "turned" using a large button in the lower left corner, or a set of two small buttons on the left side of the screen — oddly, there are no buttons on the right side, where they would be more convenient for the right-handed user. A set of number buttons, for entering page numbers, and a miniature joystick, for navigating menus, are the only other input devices.

What this means is that the Reader does not allow you to search for keywords, or scroll continuously through text, or create notes or hyperlinks. The only way to annotate the text is with a cumbersome "bookmark" function, which allows you to return to individual pages, but not to indicate a paragraph, line or word. Ironically, you can interact far more easily with a paper book, using a pencil or just dog-earing a corner of a page, than you can with the cuttingedge Sony Reader.

This shortcoming might not matter much for certain kinds of reading — browsing through a magazine, say, or even racing to the end of a disposable thriller. But the Reader's display has one fatal shortcoming that makes even that kind of quick reading impossible. Every time you turn a virtual page, the screen must reconfigure its microcapsules, so that it momentarily displays a negative of the page to come, a whiteon-black image that hovers for a second and then winks out. The disruption is so headache-inducing and hard on the eyes as to cancel out the benefits of the "E Ink" display.

The only real advantage the Reader has over a traditional book, then, is its ability to store more text than anyone could carry in a pocket or purse. Buying books for the Reader is a simple process, though like the iPod with iTunes, it requires using an official Sony site, whose inventory so far is miscellaneous and meager. And the prices are not as cheap as one would expect. Thomas Friedman's bestseller "The World Is Flat," for instance, costs $12, which is less than half the price of the hardcover, but still feels like a lot for a bunch of pixels. When you consider that you could buy a dozen new hardcovers just for the price of the Reader alone — or 20 trade paperbacks, or 40 mass-market paperbacks — old-fashioned books start to look like a pretty good deal.

Why is it, then, that the Sony Reader, with all its shortcomings, still seems cloaked in the invincible aura of the future? Why are so many readers and writers greeting it with much the same combination of respect and fear that the first Cro-Magnon man must have inspired in his Neanderthal neighbors? The reason, I suspect, has to do with our ingrained credulity about technological innovation. After seeing the horse give way to the car and the acetate cylinder to the CD, it is hard to believe that any technology is permanent, or cannot be improved with enough tinkering. Add to this the general defensiveness of readers and writers in an age of electronic media, and it is perversely easy to have a bad conscience about the very existence of the printed book — as though it were a kind of elitist Luddism still to be using a technology that was invented before Columbus discovered America.

Yet it is useful to remember that the printed book is just that — a technology, a tool designed for a specific purpose, no less than the shiny new Sony Reader. And the prospects for the book's survival do not depend on mere nostalgia, a fogeyish attachment to dusty shelves, and the smell of moldy paper. No, the reason why the printed book is likely to survive, at least for our lifetimes, is that it is the best tool we have for reading works of literature. It is more durable, portable, versatile, inexpensive, and convenient than any other method so far invented for bringing words before our eyes. The book is less like the computer than it is like the fork or the wheel: a technology that, once invented, hardly needs to evolve, because it performs its function so well.

This is the pragmatic reason why printed books will survive, but it is possible to add a couple of less tangible ones. The first is that a printed book, unlike an electronic text, is its own safeguard against censorship and manipulation. It is all too easy to imagine individuals or governments burrowing into an electronic library and changing things they don't like: What the Soviets did to photographs, some future enemy of the truth could easily do to e-texts. Only a book, printed in many copies and dispersed around the world, provides an unalterable archive and a guarantee of independence. George Orwell suggested as much in "1984," when he had Winston Smith find an escape from the world of Big Brother's TV screens through an old-fashioned paper diary.

At the same time, the book is the vehicle of another, related kind of integrity: the integrity of the imaginative work. In virtual form, every kind of writing is reduced to a mere subspecies of "content" — that damning and selfdamning word, which suggests a homogeneous ocean of text, an undifferentiated stream of stimuli. The book, by contrast, gives to each imaginative creation the dignity of a separate physical container — just as each mind is ratified in its singularity by living in its own body. There is something more than mere sentiment involved in the belief that our encounters with books, like our encounters with people, should be distinct and discrete.

Seeing as the rise of the book coincided with the rise of humanism itself, it is not idle to worry that abolishing the first will mean abandoning the second. We can still feel the truth of Petrarch's paean to the book, written seven centuries ago: "Gold, silver, gems, fine raiment, a marble palace, well-cultivated fields, paintings, a splendidly caparisoned horse — such things as these give one nothing more than a mute and superficial pleasure. Books delight us through and through, they converse with us, they give us good advice; they become living and lively companions to us." Somehow, with the Sony Reader, it's just not the same.

akirsch@nysun.com