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| From
the November/December 2008 issue of The Horn Book Magazine Editorial
But can I by rights call it a page-turner? Friends still tease me when I talk about records, although the term seems imprecise enough to refer to a discrete collection of however-recorded music. Page-turner, though: with neither pages nor turns, how will we shorthand the pleasures of digital reading? With the advent of Amazon’s Kindle, discussion of the future form(s) of reading is once again before us, and in this issue three enthusiastic proponents make the case for the electronic book. Publisher Stephen Roxburgh, book-blogger Sheila Ruth, and teacher Bill Ferriter all argue for the e-book’s portability, ease of use, and access to a growing supply of digital texts; yet none of them see the printed book being replaced anytime soon. Like the kids in Ferriter’s sixth-grade classroom, I was motivated by the push-button novelty of the Kindle. And what reader wouldn’t be seduced by the prospect of thousands of new books at ten bucks a pop, delivered to your lap in seconds? While lounging poolside in Napa this summer, I ordered a Kindle edition of Alan Deutschman’s A Tale of Two Valleys: Wine, Wealth, and the Battle for the Good Life in Napa and Sonoma and got myself up to speed on my surroundings in an instant. But traveling, really, is the only time the Kindle cuts into my book-buying and -toting. I’m not one to wax sentimental about the feel and smell of paper and glue; it’s simply that bound paper books are easier to read in a larger array of situations. I love dog-earing the pages of a book (only ones I own, of course!), and the digital equivalent isn’t nearly as easy to do or as informative in effect. While searching a text is much easier with a digital version (although, with the Kindle at least, not as easy as it should be), browsing it is impossible, and when it comes to leisure reading, browsing beats searching. I have no doubt that digital reading machines will only become more common and more sophisticated, and for an idea of what they could be, see Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, the plot of which pivots on an electronic children’s book that reads you almost as easily as you read it. But function will follow form. Forget accessibility and portability — the Kindle is not nearly as good for reading a novel as a novel is. Is this good news for the printed book? For a while. And, as I’ve said before, it’s the most book-like books that have the best chance of survival (see the editorial “More Is More,” September/October 2004). But new technologies teach us new ways of entertaining and informing ourselves: witness the effect of movable type. Print and pages taught us how (and what) to write as much as they did how to read. Electronic paper may have different stories in mind.
From the November/December 2008 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
few years ago, I read Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds
on my PDA, a.k.a. Miss Palm. For a couple of weeks I happily click-click-clicked
my way through the story on the subway 
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