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THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

The Good E-Book

Literature's next big revolution will be digitized. What's so scary about that? By JACOB WEISBERG

Photograph by Anne Katrine Senstad THE POWER OF THE PRESS Printing did not meet with general welcome. . . . The neglect of literary men to note the "Bible of 42 lines" and the "Catholicon" of Gutenberg, the delayed establishment of a printing office at Paris, the indifference shown to printing in the great book-making town of Bruges and the insufficient patronage bestowed on the early printers at Rome are evidences that there was, in the beginning, a prejudice against printed books. . . . The bibliophiles of the time looked on printed books as the productions of an inartistic trade. . . . It does not appear that any book-lover of that period regarded the ["Bible of 42 lines"], or the art by which it was made, as of high merit. -- From "The Invention of Printing," by Theodore L.De Vinne, 1878

n recent months, bulletins about e-books have been breaking almost daily. After Stephen King published his novella "Riding the Bullet" exclusively in digital form, others swiftly followed suit. Simon & Schuster announced it would bring out Mary Higgins Clark's complete oeuvre in digital form. Microsoft (which owns the magazine I work for, Slate) offered Michael Crichton's latest, "Timeline," in its new Reader format, which triples the resolution of text on an L.C.D. screen.

Despite the fact that hardly anyone uses an e-book yet, the drumbeat of ventures and issuances is breeding alarm in some quarters that serious reading in the future may no longer require the accumulation of dust-catching objects made of cloth, glue, ink and wood pulp. Until recently, literary technophobes couched their dismay in skeptical pronouncements. "Nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen -- ever," the novelist Annie Proulx said a few years ago when it was still possible to harbor such an illusion. The more up-to-date complaint is that e-books are unstoppable and will mean the death of literature. People will read novels on screens, but they will read only shallow entertainment from the likes of Stephen King, Mary Higgins Clark and Michael Crichton.

If this hostility feels vaguely familiar, it may be because every new form of literary dissemination has drawn the same sort of reaction. Medieval clerics greeted printed books as imposters of illuminated manuscripts -- aesthetically inferior, textually unreliable and likely to breed a dangerous diversity of opinion. In the 1950's, the senior statesmen of publishing fretted that the paperback revolution would mean the further spread of low taste. The echo of such views is heard today in an equally misguided elite's hostility toward digital publishing; surely we will hear lamentations for the lost age of electronic literacy once scientists find a way to plant books directly into the brain.

Less jaded consideration suggests that serious and unserious readers alike have much to gain from the new technology. I came to this opinion a year ago, when I began using a Rocket eBook, the first well-designed electronic device built for reading. The Rocket, which has the heft of a folded-over paperback, is a portable screen that displays a single page of text at a time. You can think of it as a light plastic shell that allows you to take a night stand's worth of reading matter wherever you go. The availability of new works is spotty, but thousands of the classics of world literature -- the texts that digital publishing is supposed to render obsolete -- are all available for free download over the World Wide Web. If you haven't heard about this cornucopia, it may be because these classics' copyrights have expired, which means no one stands to make money from them.

Jacob Weisberg, chief political correspondent for the online magazine Slate, is a contributing writer for magazine.

A more advanced version of the Rocket is due out this fall, but the relatively primitive 1.0 version is already a thing of beauty. Putting aside the stares and questions, it is a no less comfortable way to read novels than the old hard-copy method. In fact, it is an improvement. Your book bag no longer causes backaches. You fall asleep reading and the book saves your place. And most of all, I find it more responsive to the way someone like me actually reads -- not choosing one book at a time and reading it through from cover to cover but nibbling on several according to the mood that strikes, with interruptions for newspapers and magazines. There is no reason other than superstition to believe that using an e-book diminishes your personal relationship with what you read. And because an e-book doesn't require good lighting or two hands, it is bliss in situations in which a bound volume is an awkward appendage: while eating, in bed, on the StairMaster or in the car at night (with someone else driving, please). I've read more in the past year simply because my e-book has made doing so more convenient.

At another level, absorbing literature in a variety of ways -- on screen, on paper, on tape -- helps to dispel the false equation between text and book. Powerful associations from childhood -- the smell of must, the flashlight under the covers -- have bred generations that think of themselves as book lovers rather than story hounds or prose fanciers.

But to turn such preferences into edicts is simply prejudice. The book is the text's container, not its essence. Appropriate technology for the past 500 years, it now stands on the brink of improvement. What will replace the bound volume will be, in some ways, truer to the current process of literary creation. These days, novels are most often composed not on bound leaves but on computer screens. There is no reason to believe our culture will be poorer even in amorphous ways when people absorb them from screens as well. And in definite and obvious ways, readers and writers alike will be richer for the access they will gain to an electronic version of Borges's infinite "Library of Babel." In the near future, books will cost little or nothing, never go out of print and remain eternally available throughout the wired world. Can anyone really be against that?

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June 04, 2000