February 01, 2012

Handwringing on the Subject of E-Books

Having committed most spare moments of the past month to making progress in Leo Tolstoy's massive 1869 tome, War and Peace, it seems only fitting to pause as I pass the approximate halfway point (end of Volume II, page 600 of 1224) and consider the vexing question of book format that has tormented me since the start of the e-ink revolution in late 2007. Although I bought a second generation Kindle shortly after its release in April 2009, and have since then occasionally used the thing to read books (as opposed to law articles), it has never replaced the physical format for me (as it has for many fellow techies I know). Indeed, both of my last two ill-advised book-buying binges have involved brick and mortar bookstores, and my version of War and Peace is the 2008 Vintage translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (easily my favorite Russian translators, incidentally).

As with most things in my sorry excuse for an existence, the question of why bothers me. Why haven't I abandoned the physical format yet (as I long did in music, TV, and movies)? E-books mean less clutter and less expense—what's not to love? Perhaps nothing. But I can think of at least three possible explanations as to why I—and many of my fellow bibliophiles—might not have made the leap to e-ink wholeheartedly: (1) books are intrinsically different than other media such that (a) format matters and (b) the physical format can be superior; (2) the utility people derive from pretension (i.e., others seeing your library) exceeds the cost of the clutter; or (3) we are relics of a soon to be bygone era on our way to waxing nostalgic about bookstores and paperback books much the way our parents' generation goes on about record stores and LPs.¹ Bear with me as I tackle each of these thoughts in turn. Or don't: it wouldn't be the first time I (or this third-rate site) have been abandoned, and it certainly won't be the last.

Are Books Different?

Distinguishing books from other media that have almost entirely escaped the physical world is a difficult enterprise. On the one hand, books (like music and movies) are just data easily translated to 1s and 0s and thus stored digitally. On the other hand, listening to music and watching movies are a passive form of entertainment whereas reading is active. Once I've popped a CD into its player, it is indistinguishable from a digital recording played off an iPod; the same is not true of a book, where physical manipulation of pages is required.

The issue becomes especially salient when reading a book like War and Peace, which is written in multiple languages and requires heavy annotation for modern readers. Between all the French and German dialogue left intact and translated in footnotes, and the end notes that explain obscure historical references, I imagine my edition of War and Peace would be essentially unreadable in a digital format. Accessing the end notes in the physical copy is irritating as it is, but having to jump back and forth to footnotes in the digital edition to understand dialogue that was half French and half English translated from the Russian would be absolutely unbearable. In fact, many of the Amazon reviewers make this exact point about the Kindle edition of the 2008 Vintage edition.

So, at the very least, we can conclude that (a) format can make a difference for books in a way it doesn't for passive media, and (b) in some instances at least, the physical format may be superior. What about cost? Again, the answer isn't clear. The venerable Wall Street Journal, for instance, noted (subscription required) in December that as publishers have begun to set their own prices (rather than the flat rates dictated by Amazon), the prices of e-books sometimes exceed the cost of the paperback version by $10 or more. No matter your commitment to minimalism and clutter-free living, that sort of premium is hard to justify paying.

The trouble with the format justification, however, is that it is too shortsighted. We are still early in the e-book revolution and with improving technology, it may be that format becomes irrelevant here too. A reasonable analogy might be the story of compression algorithms and music. In the mid 1990s, CDs still had worth because the 44.1 kHz that CD audio offered was usually vastly superior to the shit recordings available on the Internet. Fifteen years later, compression algorithms are such that we can have the same or better quality sound as CDs with same or less disk space as those crappy mid 1990s MP3s. Anyone who buys a CD today is a fool. And let's not even get started on lossless algorithms such as FLAC!

Thus, while the format argument might provide some solace at the moment, clearly another justification will be required to support my continued purchase of physical books, if not now, then soon.

How Much Is Pretension Really Worth?

Can pretension be that justification? Certainly, it has long justified far worse on this dreadful site. But after reading an article (subscription required) late last year in the (consummately pretentious) New Yorker, I am no longer convinced. In a nutshell, the author in that article, who is tasked with packing up his deceased father-in-law's library, asks what is the value of a private library? His ultimate conclusion is that, maybe, it's not much, and certainly not as much as we who collect vast quantities of dead trees might like to think it is.

Sad as I am to admit it, the author's arguments really resonated me after some reflection. What would my library say to someone tasked with packing up all my shit if I were to get hit by a bus tomorrow (or end it all after the 49ers or Cal suffer yet another devastating loss)? Would they be impressed by all the languages I know how to code (as evidenced by the various O'Reilly books on the subject) and all the Russian literature I had consumed before my inopportune death? Or would they silently curse me for not having cleaned up my own shit before my untimely demise and conclude that I was just some pretension jerk off who didn't know how to code half the languages he had books for and who hadn't read more than a quarter of the books he owned? I mean, seriously, what kind of asshole actually owns Aron Nimzowitsch's My System?

This compelling argument combined with the facts that (1) I live in a broom closet in Midtown, (2) rarely have anyone over to my place to witness my pretension as a consequence, and (3) move far more often than I would like, makes it rather obvious that pretension is not, in fact, worth it.

Am I a Relic?

Which brings me to the most likely explanation: I (and many of my generation) are relics of a bygone era. As I noted last year, a new generation of pant-shitting ingrates is already among us. Will that generation relish the calm weekend afternoons browsing through bookstore shelves the way I do? Hard to see it happening with all these newfangled smartphones and social networks and sexts.

So, maybe this is the time we stop asking why and just accept that we're become our parents, at least in the generational relic sense. To truly become our parents, we'd have to engage in a sixty year project of self-righteousness and hypocrisy, inflate an unsustainable entitlement state that we consciously chose to habitually underfund, bankrupt the world, fuck up the family unit through endemic selfishness, and then leave our children holding the bag on the whole goddamn mess. But that's a story for another day.

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All the bullshit and rambling aside, what can I conclude after this verbal diarrhea of an entry? Two things: first, as long as format is an issue, I'm going to continue to buy paper copies of certain types of books (mostly older or complicated ones) while moving to e-books for just about everything new; and second, publishers ought to rejoice because those older or complicated books that are generally available for free on e-readers as a consequence of being out of copyright are precisely the ones for which a physical format (with its superior annotation) actually makes sense. The irony is rich—even the Baby Boomers couldn't have planned it better.

^ ¹ Full disclosure: I own both turntables and LPs. They sound different, and in some cases, better than digital audio. That doesn't mean that I support LPs as the principal medium of music delivery, however. Have you ever had to carry around a bunch of LPs? It's not fun.