I ordered a Kindle the other day, something I long thought I would never do. I’ve held out against e-reading for steadfastly aesthetic and sentimental reasons: I like the weight of books, their smell, the sound of pages turning. I like looking at covers and dust jackets, and I like using a Post-it as a bookmark so I can jot down words, places, and names I want to look up later.
What made me abandon my hang-ups about e-readers is that I’m heading overseas soon, and for a long time. My reading interests tend toward the specific, and I couldn’t bear the thought of spending a year or longer reading nothing but bestselling paperbacks passed on from traveler to traveler. (One time while traveling I read the traumatically bad Angels and Demons, simply because there was nothing else available.) A “device,” as everyone enjoys calling them, seemed the only answer.
I’m sure I’ll be pleased with the purchase. Once I’m in those faraway lands where English-language books are scarce, the intellectual pleasure I get from reading exactly what I want will easily trump the aesthetic displeasure I get from holding an electronic gadget instead of a paper-and-ink book.
But as I sat on the couch last night reading one of those paper-and-inkers, I realized that by moving to e-readers we’re losing something more than just aesthetics. We’re losing reader’s vanity.
Even though reading itself is a private activity, books clearly have a social dimension to them. We carry books around with us, we read them in public, and other people—friends, roommates, strangers at the coffee shop—often see them. I doubt there are many bookish people who haven’t secretly hoped someone would notice what they were reading and admire them for it, maybe even fall in love with them for it.
Reader’s vanity like that has been with me my entire reading life. I like hearing people comment on what I’m reading. I like the idea that my reading reflects well on me. I haven’t ever read anything purely for vanity’s sake—slogging through something I hated just because it looked smart—or ostentatiously called attention to a book I was holding, but I’ve always gotten a thrill from the way a book subtly advertises my intellectual life.
Of course, that advertisement no longer exists with a Kindle. As e-books continue to supplant print, the population of readers will become an undifferentiated mob of tablet-holders. Their reading choices will be no one’s business but their own. No one will be able to tell if you’re reading an e-book with a file size of two megabytes or ten. Nor will they be able to tell whether it’s a trashy murder mystery, or a serious historical treatise, or even a damned magazine.
Also, to look at things from the other side of the glass, the proliferation of e-readers is going to make it impossible, as a people-watcher, to judge others by what they’re reading. Who hasn’t taken a greater or lesser interest in a stranger based on what book they had in front of them? Reading choices can be a window into someone’s soul. A Kindle shuts the blinds.
It’s not unreasonable to suppose that e-books will completely (or very nearly completely) take over print within our lifetimes. It’s a strange vision of the future: libraries and bookstores moved entirely online, everyone staring at identical black or slate-gray tablets. I imagine it will be harder to make an intellectual map of one’s environment. Books are part of the color and life of our world, and in their absence we’ll probably lose a shade of understanding of those around us.
But if there’s one lesson to be drawn from technological development in the past ten years, it’s that where there’s a desire, it will be met. If readers feel they’ve lost something by migrating to e-books, someone will find a way to give it back to them. Most likely, as books and libraries move online, so too will readers’ vanities and judgments.
I noticed on my roommate’s Kindle, for example, that there’s a “share” feature: Let your friends know what you’re reading, in real time! You can highlight text and press a button to broadcast it to the world, presumably through Facebook, Twitter, or some other social time-wasting site.
At the moment this kind of sharing seems a bit too vain, even for me. I want people to notice what I’m reading, I don’t want to shout it at them. But in time the crafty souls at Amazon and elsewhere may find more subtle ways for us to regain our reader’s vanity. Perhaps a small screen on the opposite side of the tablet that displays the cover of the book you’re reading. Or an app that detects other e-readers within a fifty-foot radius and tells you what’s on them.
Maybe these things are already in development. But until the purveyors of e-readers give me a dignified way to display my reading choices, I’ll just have to learn to be a bit less vain, and a bit less judgmental. Both of those would be healthy changes for me. But that doesn’t mean I have to like them.
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