A little over three years ago, in a fit of apparent insanity, a New York-based independent press bought a sizeable chunk of the short-story collection I'd been working on and published it as a stand-alone volume. I remain proud of the book,
A Field Guide to the North American Family, which was reissued last month in paperback. A lot has changed since the end of 2007, though, and the new edition has me thinking again about a couple of misapprehensions I was laboring under at the time of its writing. The first was that inserting an "illustrated fiction" into an otherwise un-illustrated cycle of stories was just the thing to ignite the bidding war that would make me a millionaire. (Thanks a lot,
W.G. Sebald!) The more important, related misapprehension, though, has to do with "the future of the book."
In college, I had been an extracurricular binge-reader of 1960s and '70s "experimental" literature, in secret rebellion against the masterpieces-only Atkins diet that comprised my coursework. Even in my mid-twenties, I was convinced that the novel of the future would incorporate as much
Cortazar and
Cather, as much
Willie Masters as
Wilhelm Meister. History had different ideas, as usual. Two weeks after my exuberantly book-y book came out - replete with color photography and typographic mayhem - Amazon launched the first
Kindle, which sold out in less than a day. The book of the future, it turned out, had a built-in battery. And what I'd just published would never work on it.
Then again, as my therapist suggests (though my accountant begs to differ) maybe this accidental Kindle-proofing is a blessing in disguise. My nostalgia for print, after all, is something like
Balzac's for the wooden printing press in
Lost Illusions:
At the time when this story opens, the Stanhope press and the ink-distributing roller had not yet come into use in small provincial printing-houses.... [Now] the rapid spread of machine presses has swept away all this obsolete gear to which, for all its imperfections, we owe the beautiful books printed by
Elzevir,
Plantin,
Aldus Didot, and the rest...
In the novel that follows, Balzac links speedier and more efficient printing technology, and the larger cultural pressures it stands for, to the artistic failures of his would-be hero, the "provincial" Lucien Chardon. Unable to withstand the allure of a fast franc, Lucien becomes in Paris whatever is French for "sellout." (Not to mention - horrors - a critic!) But I would become no Lucien Chardon - not with
Field Guide, anyway. To "sell out," you first have to sell, and in committing to the ideal of the "beautiful" book, I had pretty much guaranteed that this particular project would remain unsullied by commerce.
Now, in honor of the future that never was, the durable pigments of the almost obsolete, I offer you the following trade secrets to fellow writers. The availability for the Kindle of some of the titles mentioned below points to the difficulty of the task; nonetheless, here are:
Seven Ways to Kindle-proof Your Book
Step 1. Use Color
The iPad and Barnes & Noble's NookColor have already gone some way toward countering this strategy, and Amazon is rumored to have plans to follow suit with a full color, full-functionality tablet. As of this writing, however, the top-selling eReader, the Kindle, remains a black-and-white only affair. I suggest, then, that all of you aspiring Kindle-proofers out there familiarize yourselves with the color palette on your word-processors. You may, as
Mark Z. Danielewski does in
House of Leaves, choose to assign a single word its own color, like the sodapop in the old Cherry 7-Up commercials. (
Isn't it cool...in pink?) Or you may opt for a subtler approach, à la
Richard Flanagan. In
Gould's Book of Fish, Flanagan uses a different color for each chapter, to represent the different dyes employed by his ichthycidal narrator. Still not persuaded? I once heard that
Faulkner planned to use different-colored type to distinguish the different voices in
As I Lay Dying. If it's good enough for a Nobelist, isn't it good enough for you?
Step 2. Illustrate, Illustrate, Illustrate
In an
essay published in
The New Yorker a couple years back,
Nicholson Baker complained that "photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don’t fare so well on the little gray screen" of the Kindle. Of course, as with Step 1, the iPad complicates things, and glossy ("glossy"?) magazine readers are apparently "
flocking" to the NookColor. (Constant vigilance is the price of Kindle-proofing!) But it's worth pointing out that, where words on a page are an abstraction of an abstraction, illustrations are only one representative step away from the visual world. And so the venerable tradition of the illuminated manuscript still seems to favor, at this stage of the game, the codex book. No wonder that, as writers grow anxious about the fate of print, we're seeing an uptick in illustrated fiction; it's the literary equivalent of abstract painting's retort to photography. (This is to say nothing of graphic novels.) Lavishing attention on hand-made illustrations - as in
Joe Meno's
Demons in the Spring - or incorporating photographs, like
Rod Sweet and
Tim Williams'
Instructions for the Apocalypse or
Leanne Shapton's
Important Artifacts, is a great way to add an extra exclamation point to your literary pooh-poohing of the eReader.
Step 3. Play With Text, Typeface, and White Space
eReaders currently use two approaches to rendering text. One is quasi-photographic, but the Kindle's remains the more battery-efficient method of imposing a standard typeface. This makes the effects of a textually playful book like Danielewski's
House of Leaves or
Karen Tei Yamashita's
I Hotel or
William H. Gass'
The Tunnel - difficult to render on a Kindle. If you want to up the degree of difficulty, you can try combining this with step 1, following Gass' lead in
Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, wherein text in a range of typefaces and sizes curves and distends and floats around and behind the illustrations. And then there's white space.
Mallarmé may have got there first, but
Blake Butler's
There is No Year is moving the ball forward. It's available for Kindle, but only the good Lord and
Jeff Bezos know how it reads there. (I don't think I need to point out the irony of the Amazon customer review for
A Visit from the Goon Squad that finds "the 'powerpoint' chapter...extremely difficult to read on the Kindle.")
Step 4. Run With Scissors
The opening story of
John Barth's
Lost in the Funhouse, famously invites readers to take scissors to it and create a Mobius strip. This cut-up aesthetic is more literal in
Jonathan Safran Foer's
Tree of Codes, which slices and dices the pages of
Bruno Schulz's
Street of Crocodiles to create pages like lace. It's a piece of found prose-poetry whose sentences change as you turn the page. Except on the Kindle, where it doesn't - and couldn't - exist.
Step 5. Go Aleatory
Narrative fiction, as
Vladimir Propp would tell you, need not proceed in a straight line. Presumably, the HopScotching of Cortazar's
Rayuela would be easy enough to approximate via hyperlink on a Kindle, as might something structured like
Raymond Queneau's "
A Story As You Like It." But what about a story where the order of the pieces genuinely doesn't matter. Or one where an Oulippan element of chance is built in? A narrative like Coover's "deck of cards" story from
A Child Again, say. Or
B.S. Johnson's
The Unfortunates, which consists of a beginning, an ending, and 25 middle chapters to be shuffled and read at random. Speaking of
The Unfortunates...
Step 6. Put It In A Box
Gass at one point imagined reinforcing the random, "pile of pages" aspect of
The Tunnel by printing it loose-leaf and selling it in a box. It can't be any coincidence that, in the age of the Kindle, the book as boxed set has been making a comeback. New Directions, in addition to
The Unfortunates, has given us the slipcovered (and thus far unKindled)
Microscripts of
Robert Walser. McSweeney's, another box-loving press, has delivered any number of issues of the Quarterly, not to mention
One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in boxed form. And in 2008, Hotel St. George Press published
Ben Greenman's archetypally box-intensive
Correspondences, albeit in a limited edition.
Step 7. Pile on the End Matter
This strategy exploits not so much a technical weakness of the Kindle as a practical one. My theory is that, because the number of pages remaining in a book aren't palpable on a digital device, readers are less likely to go digging around in appendices, acknowledgments, and so forth. The endnotes function on the Kindle apparently makes it pretty easy to jump from the main text to the famous fine print of
Infinite Jest. But with other kinds of end matter, aren't you likely to hit "The End" and think: I'm done? Writers who sneak interesting and potentially meaningful information into the back of the book are thus a step closer to Kindle-proofing than the rest of us. Here I'm thinking specifically of
William T. Vollmann, whose resolutely booktacular books often contain dozens, even hundreds of pages of end matter (interesting in direct proportion to the interest of the main text.) Or
Walter Benjamin's
Arcades Project. But I was struck, reading
Georges Perec's
Life A User's Manual this spring, by the way the various indexes and appendices offered a variety of possible reformattings of the main text.
Bonus List: 10 Pretty Damn Kindle-Proof (at least, as of this writing) Books:
1.
Nox, by
Anne Carson (Rules Exploited: 1, 2, 3, 6): In many ways, this boxed version of a mourning journal Carson made after the death of her brother is the paragon of the Kindle-proof book: a book built out of books, and alert to its own status as an object.
2.
The Original of Laura, by
Vladimir Nabokov (Steps Taken: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5): The chief attraction of this slender posthumous work is its
Chip Kidd design, which invites readers to cut out facsimiles of the notecards Nabokov composed on and make their own book...though, given the $35 cover price, I can't imagine too many readers took Kidd up on it.
3.
A Field Guide to the North American Family, by yours truly (1, 2, 3, 5): This is probably the only excuse I'll ever have to insert my name in a list between Nabokov's and Jonathan Safran Foer's. There. I've done it.
4.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer (1, 2, 3): A Kindle version of
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close actually exists, but, even if Amazon were to insert an animation, there is just no way to achieve in e-form the flip-book effect on which this novel's conclusion rises...and falls.
5.
The Principles of Uncertainty, by
Maira Kalman (1, 2): Okay, this is actually pretty easy to recreate on an iPad. But who would want to read this gorgeous thing on a screen?
6.
Dictionary of the Khazars, by
Milorad Pavic (5): The chief Kindle-resistant feature of
Dictionary of the Khazars is that it is actually two books: a "male version" and a (slightly different) "female version," bound back to back. You move from one to the other by flipping the book over and starting from the other end. Kindle
that, Amazon!
7.
Only Revolutions, by Mark Z. Danielewski (1, 3, 5): Unlike
House of Leaves, the National-Book-Award-nominated
Only Revolutions is too insanely Kindle-proof to actually be a good book. I found its main text - which takes the flip & read logic of Pavic a step further - to be a hackneyed pastiche of
Finnegans Wake. But you can't blame a guy for trying.
8.
One Hundred Thousand Million Poems, by Raymond Queneau (4, 5): This
echt-Oulippan "poetry machine" is a set of 10 sonnets, bound to a spine, but with incisions between the lines that extend out to the edge of the page. Readers can manipulate the pages to form and reform sonnets. Mathematically, there are 1,000,000,000,000,000 possible variations. In theory, an eBook equivalent of this would work beatifully (you'd just have to build in a "shuffle" function) - though by equivalence rather than reproduction.
9.
Rising Up and Rising Down (the unabridged version), by William T. Vollmann (2, 3, 5, 7): In theory, this should be the perfect eBook candidate, in the sense that no one wants to lug the damn thing on the subway. It is, in a sense, almost all appendix. I'd bet dollars to donuts, though, that, via the logic sketched in point 7 above, no one would ever get through a digital edition. Vollmann's detractors would argue that's a good thing. I'm not so sure...
10.
Where the Wild Things Are, by
Maurice Sendak (1, 3): The brilliance of
Where the Wild Things Are, as a children's librarian once pointed out to me, is not just the illustrations, but the way they gradually expand to fill the page spreads (what's called a full-bleed)...and then recede again into white space. It enacts for children the dialectic of wildness and safety that is the book's explicit subject, and has, this librarian insisted, a deeply therapeutic effect.
Wild Things, that is, uses its book-ness beautifully. You could reproduce this on a screen...but unless the aspect ratio was 2:1, it would have to be in thumbnail form. Perhaps the solution, as
Reif Larsen has suggested, is to get away from the idea of reproduction altogether. Rather than deluding ourselves that the eBook is a book, we should think carefully about the effects each can achieve that the other can't, and then work to find equivalents between them. And lo and behold, a fantastically
inventive app of Larsen's
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (Steps Taken: 2, 3) is now available for the iPad...perhaps pointing the way to yet another future of the book.
In a new commercial for the Amazon Kindle, a man and a woman lie on beach chairs, glazing beneath the sun. The tragically average man is trying to read his iPad; due to the glare, he can no longer follow his Patterson. The woman, Kindle in hand, has no problem with the sun; by the looks of her, she has no problems at all. The man’s shortcomings are plain, and the message is equally clear: the Kindle will make you sexier and resist the sun.
In recent years, grief for such losses—music stores, newsrooms, this tradition or that—has become so common and compressed that it’s become a cultural given. We now swallow our objections, lest they later seem absurd. A few years ago, I stood in Tower Records, praising its stock to a friend: You can hold a compact disc; buying an album is a genuine act. And just look at Bitches Brew: don’t you want to have it?
The prospect of our wonders used to bring excitement. In the early nineties, after seeing Dick Tracy, I dreamed of his two-way radio. How cool would that be? I thought. Incredibly, I found out: as two-way radios came to market, then gripped every inch of our lives, they became not cool at all. Awe gave way to grabbiness: digitize everything, please. Books are the latest items to be forced into the hole.
I don’t understand the need to choose one form of books over the other. I picked up the “real” version of To the End of the Land and a digital copy of Darkness Visible last weekend. Switching between the two, I don’t sense any kind of let down or plastic experience. When it comes to the written word I say, the more the merrier.
Thanks for the essay Jacob. I find myself playing a subtle “I can’t hear you” game with all references to the wonders of the Kindle. I’m sure I wouldn’t turn one down, but me and my books? We’re feeling pretty content just the way we are.
I second the comment from Foster J. Pinkney. When I travel I read on my kindle and when I’m in my home I read from print books. Both have their purpose and I am a happier reader with both print and digital words at my fingertips.
When publishers no longer print on paper, and libraries have gone fully digital, it will be the used bookstores of the land that are the last places were we can find our tangible books.
I’m 51, and have read about 40 books a year since I was 20. I love physical books, and when I bought my iPad earlier this year, I gave e-books a try. It was the easiest format switch I ever made.
There’s no need to apologize for wanting to stick with the paper model. But there’s no need to wear your preferences like a badge of honor, either.
Great piece. Like you, I love the physical aspect of books – there are few things I enjoy as much as browsing through used books – but I don’t fear that e-readers will destroy literature or the experience of reading. I haven’t bothered to buy an e-reader yet because many of the books I read haven’t been digitized yet, but I look forward to a revolution of reissues like the one that CDs brought to music. And I won’t mind freeing some shelf-space when I finally get a reader; five years ago I gave away more than 200 vinyl albums and I haven’t regretted it once.
It’s possible to love books as physical objects and still want an e-reader. Honestly, I’m getting a kindle because otherwise I will never finish Moby Dick – it just doesn’t fit in my bag and is too bulky for the bus.
The Kindle is so wicked popular for deploying Soldiers. It’s totally impractical to tote 20 lbs of books across the Atlantic, but the Kindle?
I love physical books as much as the next guy, but I’m pretty sure I’m not going back.
E-readers just seem like technology for technologie’s sake. Other than use in school to eliminate heavy, unweildy textbooks, what purpose do they really have for the average, everyday reader? I have yet to hear a convincing argument that answers this queston. I stare at a computer screen all day long – the last thing I want to do at night is stare at another computer screen just to read a book, especially when I don’t have to. Let’s hope that reading paper doesn’t become a non-choice in the future! Try lending an e-book to a friend, reading an e-book to your child at night, lining your bookshelf with “A” e-reader. It’s just not the same and never will be! I don’t care which e-reader is the “best” b/c I just don’t care about e-readers at all! Why should I??
My new kindle arrived (I had a 2nd gen already; this is the 3rd gen) and was having fun with it all weekend, loading it up with new books, showing it off to relatives, etc.
Then my two year old found a little 2 inch by 1 inch Etch-a-Sketch, and began carrying around, playing with it, drawing on it, showing it to everyone and explaining it was a “puter” and “my little book.”
That evening I read my kids a story off the kindle. We read a picture book too. The toddler went to sleep cuddling his “little book.” He would not be parted from it.
It’s not the format but the content that matters. But I agree, there is something about the tactile interaction with an object which is soothing at the monkey-brain level. It’s amazing how quickly you come to love holding your reader.
I think public libraries are the most crucial factor in the war between paper and screen. The dilemma framed by this essay is irrelevant to readers who never buy books. Libraries will have a much harder time switching to e-readers, because they require equipment. Maybe they will rent Kindles along with e-books? I’m reassured by the fact that my library still has a huge selection of CDs and VHS tapes; bureaucracy and budget cuts may finally benefit us by delaying digitization. Hopefully libraries will also be inundated by the books cast off by e-readers, pushing the switch even further off.
I enjoyed this article, but I do have to say that I don’t see this as a dilemma. One can enjoy both print and digital formats. I don’t own an e-reader (no interest and no disposable income for it anyway), but I’m an avid online literary journal reader, and most people I’ve encountered who actually own e-readers still buy print books. I don’t think print, at least when it comes to literature, is going anywhere anytime soon.
Of course e-readers will continue to rise in popularity, but print won’t die. I think print and digital will coexist for a good while. There are too many people who are emotionally/psychologically connected to the experience of reading a physical book. On top of that, the environmental effects of e-readers are pretty effing horrible (The Price of the Paperless Revolution by Ted Genoways).
“JS” says above: “E-readers just seem like technology for technologie’s sake. Other than use in school to eliminate heavy, unweildy textbooks, what purpose do they really have for the average, everyday reader? I have yet to hear a convincing argument that answers this queston. ”
Here’s my argument: I usually read during my daily commute to work, and I’m presently reading the complete Sherlock Holmes for the second time on my Nook. The last time I read it I could never do it during my commute because my copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes is so large it’s hard to hold up even when reading it at home. By contrast, my Nook is small enough to fit in a pants pocket, and it also contains Moby Dick, the complete works of Jane Austin, and the complete works of Charles Dickens, all of which I’d be unable to read or reread during my commute.
Incidentally, an e-reader is ideal for reading older books like the ones above, because unlike best sellers, out-of-copyright books in electronic form are free or virtually free and you’re not depriving authors of royalties (or used-book stores of their future stock) when you buy them.
I am one of the few who appreciate the scent of the ink and the comforting heaviness of a book in hands There is something so beautiful and calming about flipping through pages of a book.
I wish I could continue buying paper books and reading them. I really do. However, sadly, after moving to Asia, purchasing books (via Amazon) has become so painfully expensive (the shipping cost especially) that I am financially unable to indulge my protest.
Every time I buy books from Amazon, I am an inch closer to buying a Kindle. And the flamboyant advertisement of Kindle at every corner of the check out page did not help either.