Turning a Page Part 1

Say Goodbye

By Doug Borsom

We writers are a sentimental lot.

Witness the image in the upper-left at this website—a typewriter, and a manual typewriter at that. It even graces the cover of We Wanted to be Writers.

But even as most of us have moved to computers or have never known anything but, we still like the idea of the typewriter (or longhand), if not the way the ink from the ribbon got all over our fingers.

Given the traditionalism in production, it’s not surprising to find something similar in consumption. I’m talking about e-books and e-readers.

I’m here to say, Get over it. They are the future, and that’s a good thing both for writers and readers.

In a pair of columns back in February, Eric Olsen, while admitting the advantages of e-readers, confessed that the printed page continues to exert a special pull on him.

Of course it does. We grew up with books. When we were too young to read, we sat in our parents’ laps, their heartbeats at our backs, their breath in our ears, books resting in our laps as they read to us.

Now take away that block of wood pulp and carbon black and substitute a Kindle or iPad or Nook. That happy three-year-old will grow up with fond memories of a slab of glass, metal, and silicon. She’ll tell her child about the silly, old fashioned, clunky e-reader she used as a kid, that couldn’t take dictation or even understand voice commands. How it had a little dimple in one corner from the time she dropped it. How she decorated the back with animal stickers and glow-in-the-dark stars and planets.

Similarly, other warm associations we have with printed books will transfer to e-readers and their infinite content.

Eric’s columns centered on an old, beloved, well-marked copy of The Long Goodbye. He wondered what would happen to the marginalia we annotate our books with in an age of e-books. He also mentioned that the printed book allows one to survey others’ reading habits in public settings like airplanes (Perhaps not a plus for the flier reading Sade’s Justine.)

Not to sound geeky, but these are issues of implementation and are not intrinsic to e-readers. Some devices already support highlighting and annotating, and even sharing notes with others. For those folks with inhibitions about writing in printed books, e-readers provide a guilt-free pleasure.

As for airport book-checking, want to know what your fellow fliers have on their e-readers? There’s an app on your e-reader for that. OK, maybe not yet, but there will be. Trust me.

I would gladly kiss goodbye the crappy gray paper and smudgy print of the Penguin Classics. And back when I bought my Bantam Classic paperback of Brave New World, the 75 cent price seemed like a bargain. At $14.99 ($8.99 discounted at Amazon) that feeling is long, long gone. I include hardbound books in my complaints. In recent years, there’s been a noticeable decline in the binding, paper, and print quality of the hardcover books I read. So in addition to saving $ by axing editors and proofreaders, publishers are screwing us on the physical book, as well.

But this isn’t why the coming age of the e-book is a good thing.

Go to your local bookstore and buy a copy of T.C. Boyle‘s fine story collection After the Plague.

They don’t have it.

So try Amazon.

They don’t have it, either.

The book is out of print.

That’s stupid, but perfectly sensible and all too common given the economics of the printed book.

Now imagine a world where there are no out-of-print books, where everything ever published by your favorite authors—even the most obscure novels, stories, poems, and essays—is available; a world where the reader still has access and the author’s work still gets exposure and, when under copyright, earns a royalty.

No out-of-print books.

That’s why the e-book will win out and why I am eager for the transition.

Still . . .

For a follow-on to this post, I needed to verify a line from a John Cheever short story. I didn’t recall the exact line nor the story’s title. I could have electronically searched the e-book edition of The Stories of John Cheever. But I don’t own the e-book edition. Why would I when I have my Alfred A Knopf hardback that I got back in 1978, 600-some substantial pages?

I got out a step-stool and took the book down from the top shelf, just below the ceiling, where it shares the neighborhood with Cervantes and Chandler, Chesterton and Connell. With its reassuring heft resting comfortably in my lap, I paged through, looking for the passage, stopping now and again to read a paragraph or two from some story that it has been too long since I last read (“The Angel of the Bridge,” “The Seaside Houses,” “The Reunion,”); being reminded of why we wanted to be writers.

The physical act of turning pages a third of a century old, a bit musty, and now a faint cream color, the tactile glide of the paper under my fingers and the sound that accompanies the turning; I cannot deny the pleasure of this.

Still . . .

The printed book will fade away.

“To say goodbye is to die a little.” In a Raymond Chandler novel, Phillip Marlowe echoes this old French proverb. The book’s title is The Long Goodbye. My guess is that the passage is underlined in Eric’s copy.