eBooks, eBookshelves, eLibraries

A whole library dumped on my doorstep ...

One of the odd things about reading eBooks is that the booksellers encourage you to use only their own software for reading them. Of course this is to insure you will keep buying from them, since they have integrated their own digital "stores" as an extension of what you're reading.

Amazon is the worst culprit in this practice because they go further by using a proprietary format for their eBooks that insures you have to use their software. But Apple, Barnes and Noble, Google, Kobo and the rest do the same thing even if they agree on using the ePub standard format. Amazon even locks down their tablets to prevent you from installing reading software from other vendors. (This is the main reason I tell everyone not to buy a Kindle. Most other tablets, even from B&N and Kobo, will allow you freedom of choice.) So if you want to buy from multiple vendors you end up having to remember who you bought a book from so you can look for it in the appropriate software.

This is just weird. Imagine if you could only pick up and read one of your paper books if you could remember where you bought it. Hm, let's see. I was on my way to San Francisco, and in the airport ... or was it after I got there and went to City Lights? Or did I just take it with me to read on the trip?

It's possible to centralize your digital library with something like the Aldiko reader (for Android) or Adobe Digital Editions (Windows and Mac), but the lack of multiplatform support and digital rights management issues (the dread DRM) can make that challenging. So in practice we're ending up with these compartmentalized collections as if we had to organize our library in bookcases labeled "Amazon" et al. instead of Fiction, Biography, History, etc.

One of the downsides to this is that we're dependent on the bookseller to stay in business so they can continue to support their distribution ecosystem. How reliable is that? What would happen to all your eBooks (and music) if Amazon went belly up someday? Well, okay, maybe that's not likely. But what if it was Barnes & Noble? Not impossible, since they're struggling. It already happened to Borders, which had partnered with Kobo for eBooks. Luckily for their customers, Kobo remained open for business even after the chain of stores went down the tubes, but that was only because they were separate companies. (Kobo subsequently formed a partnership with the Independent Booksellers Association, which is why you should go to the website of your favorite indie bookseller and sign up for an account through them.)

Another case in point is Sony. The faltering entertainment juggernaut was in the eBook business at one time, and even launched one of the first readers with an ePaper display. This is where it gets personal, because the unimaginatively named "Sony Reader" was my first one. (I wrote about it here and here back in 2008.) I used it extensively for several years, mostly to catch up on the wealth of free literature available in the public domain from Project Gutenberg.

As the competition heated up with Amazon, Sony released a software update so they could convert to the ePub standard and abandon their own proprietary one. But they had missed the boat on distribution. What made the Kindle such a runaway success was not the reader or software or even the pricing available from Amazon's vast catalog. It was the ability to buy instantly over the air. Sony was too late to that party, having started out with the idea that you would shop on your desktop computer and push books onto your device through a cable. Quaint. So last year they decided to pull the plug on their whole book store to staunch the bleeding.

I was sorry to see them go. My Reader still works and still has unfinished books on it. (Be patient, Joseph Conrad, I'm getting back to you!) But I imagined my ability to re-download them vanishing. Kobo to the rescue! The Canadian company now owned by Rakuten of Japan struck a deal to take over all of Sony's existing clients along with their purchase history.

Amazingly, when the day came I didn't even have to do anything. I just got an email from Kobo letting me know that all my Sony books were now available in my Kobo library. Grabbing my tablet, I looked, and there they were. Instant gratification.

Imagine if when Borders went out of business a Barnes and Noble truck had pulled up to my front door and deposited copies of all my Borders-purchased books. Impossible of course, with traditional books. Not necessary, either, because they were already on the shelf. But with eBooks all things are possible. And necessary.

[Next time -- the changing library.]

KOBO - Now More Than Ever

It's not too late to support your local independent book seller ...

Of all the reading platforms for ebooks perhaps the one with the most fortuitous name is not Kindle or Nook but Kobo. (Let's omit the unimaginative Sony Reader Store, the goofy Google Play Store, and the total misnomer iTunes.) So until someone starts selling a Koob or Obko reader, Kobo is the only one to call itself by an anagram of what it's all about: THE BOOK.

But I've become a fan of Kobo for more than just the name. It might be my best chance to defend my rights as a reader and to keep my friendly local bookseller in business.

Some history: In the beginning (1971) a fledgling ecosystem came to life. Project Gutenberg began offering free public domain texts after Michael Hart "invented" the idea of an ebook. By 1998 primitive reading devices came into existence, along with several variants of copy protected text formats, and they all began vying for supremacy, each offering their own limited selection of content, each supporting one or more of the available file types, but none of them dominant. They had dim, low resolution LCD screens, and were less fun to read on than your laptop -- which at the time weighed 6 pounds and heated up your legs like a toaster oven.

The first big breakthrough came with ePaper display technology. This replaced LCD screens with something much more clear, rendering black on off-white text at nearly the resolution of laser printers. Better still, these new screens drew battery power only when the page was turned, resulting in times between charges measured in weeks instead of hours. Now we're getting somewhere!

At this point Amazon exploded over the landscape like a nuclear bomb. Sony and other lesser known vendors came to market with ePaper more or less simultaneously, but Sony is now marginalized and the others are long gone because only Amazon recognized the key ingredient -- it's not the device, it's the ecosystem. Using its might as ubiquitous retailer and its ability to sell devices at or below cost, it was able to foist its own proprietary format on vast numbers of consumers who didn't care how much they were being locked in to a single vendor as long as they could get whatever they wanted from Amazon, instantly.

They key word there was instantly -- and wirelessly. It was Amazon's genius to "give away" cellular data plans with each Kindle so that you could buy your books at the beach instead of taking them with you, reducing the delivery time to zero. Can you spell "impulse buy?"

I confess it took time for this idea to grab me. My own first reading device (2008) was a Sony and it didn't even have Wi-Fi. (I didn't have it in my own home yet either.) No problem. Just download books to my PC, then plug in the USB cable and copy them over. A chore of few minutes followed by weeks of happy reading. It was much later before I experienced the instant gratification of hear-about-it / download it / read it.

I'm not sorry about the delay however. I instinctively shied away from the hermetically sealed world of Amazon with its books that can be read by nothing else. Faced with this juggernaut of competition, most other vendors had rushed to support the ePub standard and Adobe's digital rights management, in principle allowing you to buy content from whoever you wanted and read it any way you wanted. Most other reading devices will also view PDFs and plain text files, but if you want to read those on your Kindle you have to send them to Amazon first to be automatically converted to Amazon's proprietary format. This really rubs me the wrong way. I need permission to read a draft of my own novel? Not only that, they have the gall to charge you 15 cents per megabyte for the privilege.

So I trudged along with my Sony, taking advantage of the wealth of free digital books available from Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks, while still buying most of my new books in paper form. But that fledgling ecosystem was not standing still. Meanwhile the iPhone and iPad happened, then Android phones and tablets. Prices plunged and features exploded. My Sony with all its limitations cost over $300. Suddenly for a hundred bucks less you could get a general purpose tablet with full color display, sound, video, wifi, email, web browser, etc etc etc. And the miracle workers who first brought this to market was not Amazon but ... Barnes and Noble.

The venerable bricks-and-mortar bookstore had jumped on the bandwagon late, but in time to make a splash. The Nook was the first real budget priced Android tablet, subsidized and only slightly limited by having a restricted version of the App Market (now the Play Store) to prevent people from, for example, installing Kindle software and downloading books from Amazon. That's fair, right? Just try installing Nook software on a Kindle.

B&N did a lot of things right. Their hardware came out before the color version of the Kindle, and new models competed well on features as Amazon took a turn playing catchup. B&N followed up with the first back-lit ePaper device. The predictable price war ensued, benefiting the customers of both. But now it's beginning to look like the party could be over.

Faced with slumping sales in spite of its arguably superior product, B&N first began to whimper about getting out of the hardware business, then appeared to play a trump card by releasing a software upgrade that removed all restrictions on their Android tablet. Match that, Amazon!

Why would they do such a thing? Well, for the same reason I bought my Android tablet elsewhere. Namely, Google had got into the market, offering full featured tablets with no software restrictions for not much more than Amazon and B&N were charging for their locked up ones. Given the choice, why would you choose the ones that were needlessly crippled? On a Nexus you can install apps from both of the "other" booksellers and buy from whoever you want -- in addition to Google.

For awhile I was buying books from B&N on my tablet, if only to root for the underdog. But now B&N appears to be considering selling off its entire digital content division. I don't know what they're thinking. Dumping the up and coming thing to devote themselves to selling paper books and magazines? Haven't they learned anything from the experiment? Worst of all, the potential buyer may turn out to be Microsoft, which could mean the death knell for both parts of the company.

Which brings us to Kobo. Remember them? As I reported after hearing their presentation at the Miami Book Fair, Kobo was once going to be the salvation of Borders Books. The partnership was their answer to the Kindle and Nook, and it was Kobo's answer to having a brick-and-mortar anchor in the world. Kobo had great hardware at competitive prices, a commitment to open standards, and their own online book infrastructure. When Borders went under and Kobo became an orphan I was worried about them but maybe I shouldn't have been. They were orphans before the partnership, so they had little to lose while Borders needed them like a life raft.

So Kobo is still around, with newer and prettier devices. They were acquired by Rakuten, said to be "the Amazon of Japan," and have made another savvy move. They replaced Borders with a network of independent booksellers. With a bold stroke, one underdog hooked up with another. Now you can have the best of both worlds, acquiring ebooks while giving your support to your favorite local bookstore. You can create a Kobo account and install their reading app on your tablet or PC even if you don't have a Kobo device. Just be sure to register through your bookstore's website so your account will link to them.

Better do it quick. Today, no Borders. Tomorrow, perhaps no Barnes and Noble? What about the day after that? It's not that I hate Amazon. I buy from them too. I even have a wish list. I just don't ever want them to be the only place I can go.

Miami Book Fair 2011

A belated report on last year's book fair -- quick, before it's time for the next one ....

I've certainly taken my time about posting this account of Miami Book Fair International, 2011 version, but it's not from lack of interest. As ever, there was much to appreciate, and a few new wrinkles.

Big Science

My first event involved getting tickets in advance. It's always wonderful to me that a writer can command a sellout audience. In this case it's even more amazing because the stage was shared by a pair of science writers: James Gleick, author of the landmark book about chaos theory that did as much to popularize the concept as anything else, including Jeff Goldblum's character in that Jurassic Park sequel, and whose intriguing new work is called The Information; and Dava Sobel, who had just published her biography of Copernicus titled A More Perfect Heaven.

Reviews of both books are too abundant to need repeating here. I'll just add that Gleick made me want to know more about Claude Shannon, the "father of information theory," who was a contemporary of Alan Turing and swapped ideas with him during World War II. In Sobel's presentation I was most taken with her account of inspecting the original manuscript of Copernicus' book, with it's famous diagram of the sun-centered solar system. She noticed a tiny pinhole in the center of the sun, the place where the point of the great man's compass had pierced the page while he drew the concentric orbits of the planets. If that doesn't give you goose bumps, then you're in the wrong room.

During the question session that followed, I appreciated Gleick's point that science "is about uncertainty, not truth," that it is as much about asking questions as giving answers. Let's please keep this in mind when debating Darwin with the people who don't understand him. Which reminds me that Sobel mentioned a notable parallel between Darwin and Copernicus: both of their theories were widely accepted before they were actually proved, a sure sign that they were ideas whose time had come.

Another interesting point was raised about online sources of information such as Wikipedia versus traditional authorities like the Britannica that are falling out of use. (Anyone want to buy a used encyclopedia? No? It weighs about 90 pounds and was out of date the day it was printed. Still no takers?) The questioner feared we will end up only with sources we can't trust. But Gleick expressed the hope that we are in a transitional period where we have not yet learned to vet and trust the new media, which are ephemeral through the necessity of constant update.

He is, he says, predisposed to be "optimistic without justification." And perhaps that's how he could respond to a query about the looming "singularity," when machines will take over the earth, by saying simply, "by the time they take over we will be so attached to them that we won't care." Incidentally, there is another theory about the singularity which says it has already happened and we didn't notice.

All This And Noir

After these weighty matters I made my way to the bizarre and noisy tent where Akashic Books was previewing New Jersey Noir, the latest in their series of story collections that demonstrate there is a dark side to every locale on earth. I couldn't pass this up because one dark side of my own past is that, like the panellists, I also hail from the Garden State -- so called, I believe, because they created Newark and left the rest of the land comparatively unscathed.

The panel included former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, native of Long Branch, casually clad in a black T-shirt that became him, and Alan Cheuse of NPR fame, substituting for Joyce Carol Oates who couldn't make it. Alas, my notes don't tell me which of them repeated the old gag about how they say their ABC's in New Jersey. ("Fuggin A, fuggin B, fuggin C ...") Which kind of shows how informal the whole thing was. But Pinsky did wax poetic when he spoke about depicting "the beauty of the broken, sordid, and low class" -- material which they found in abundance right there at home.

What's China Doing Here?

This tent was right across from another, larger one featuring China. Yes, the country. I confess to being nonplussed by this exhibit, which was like walking into one of those places at Walt Disney Epcot where the various wares and cultural oddities of some foreign place are on display -- except here none of it was for sale, which left us all wondering what we were doing standing around and looking at shelves and tables full of Chinese export bric-a-brac. No answers were forthcoming. But I guess since our Chinese friends are everywhere, doing everything, they might as well be here too.

If You Can Read This, Thank Your Reader

The last presentation I went to was on ebook publishing, a topic dear to me as both a reader and a hopeful author. Back in the 1990's I once asked a publisher at a writing workshop what impact he thought digital media and Internet distribution were going to have on his business. His appalling answer was a single word: "None."

As evidence, he asked, "Would you curl up in bed with a computer?" I was dumbstruck. Even though there were no ebook readers in existence back then, I already knew people who were perfectly happy to take their laptops to bed with them. How could this guy not see the writing on the wall in giant letters?

Fast forward about 15 years and it's all history -- but history that is still unfolding, as purveyors of the written word, from newspapers to magazines and books, continue to deal with the biggest disruption since the invention of the printing press.

I was very impressed with the chipper young Canadian woman representing Kobo. You may recall that they had a brief affiliation with Borders Books just before the chain went bankrupt. The Kobo reader was going to be Borders' answer to the Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook -- but Borders just got there too late and too many dollars short. B&N proved they were nimble enough to get into this game, but Borders just couldn't make it.

In the aftermath of the Borders collapse, I was concerned about Kobo, who were making a very nice collection of reading devices every bit the equal of the Kindle family, but with the added virtue of supporting open standards like PDF and ePub as opposed to proprietary ones like, well, Amazon. But my concern might have been premature. Kobo managed to get a major investment from a company said to be "the Amazon of Japan." They have a very serviceable (and completely open) tablet that sells for under $200 and a thriving online bookstore. So we'll have to see how it goes.

Another feature Kobo offers is unique. Kobo Pulse is something they call "social reading," a way to instantly share your take on what you're reading with your online buddies who are similarly equipped. A show of hands revealed this optional feature was not universally appealing to the audience, which tended to split along predictably generational lines. Us older folks were squirming in our chairs and thinking "oh no, not that," while the younger ones were all like, "I'm down with that."

Whether this "gamification" of reading will take hold and eclipse the traditional reading experience is something we will have to watch as it develops. On the one hand, media companies are salivating over producing "books" for the iPad and its ilk full of embedded videos and interactive features. On the other hand, I note that writers like Neal Stephenson can continue to churn out 900 page novels the immersive experience of which beggars anything Hollywood has to offer.

So the jury is out. Maybe the next chapter, so to speak, will be written, as it were, at the next version of the Miami Book Fair, coming in November.

On the Joys of Reading Long Books

There was a time in my life when I found books of a certain size intimidating. Maybe it goes back to my attempt, at the age of twelve, to absorb my father's copy of War and Peace when the only adult literature I had read until then was science fiction. I remember getting to the end of chapter one and feeling like I'd just eaten way too much chocolate cake. I knew it was good stuff, on a level above anything I'd seen, but I also knew I wasn't ready for it.

By the time I reached high school I was able to plow my way through not only Tolstoy but Dostoyevsky, and not only Russians but Americans like Steinbeck and Faulkner -- even Absolom, Absolom with its pages-long sentences. In my college years Hermann Hesse came into vogue, so I consumed most of his works including the monumental Magister Ludi (or The Glass Bead Game) which is supplemented at the end by a sort of appendix of poetry and three short stories  purported to have been written by its main character, a wonderful example of a book that contains other books. I also developed my fondness for philosophical works by digesting William James' Varieties of Religious Experience and Aldous Huxley's The Perrenial Philosophy. Both of those are heavy wading, but they made an interesting pair since they shared the idea that all the world's religions have much in common, an idea that appealed to me as a Unitarian who was destined to become a Quaker.

Then, as happens to many of us, I became so caught up in the world and the need to make a living that I found less time for reading. I returned to my first love of science fiction for recreation, and gravitated toward short stories that were quicker to consume. I lost my taste for big thick books that revealed from their sheer bulk the amount of time and attention that would have to be give to them. It was so much easier to take two hours to absorb a movie or a magazine.

I suppose it has just been reaching a later stage of my life that has drawn me back to those substantial works I had avoided for so long. But the pleasure of discovery -- or rediscovery -- has been well worth the wait. Armed only with the willingness, I launched into such projects as reading the twenty volumes of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring novels, and Neal Stephenson's trilogy of 700-pagers set in the Baroque period. I also got an ebook reader and have been using it to catch up on many of the classics that I had somehow managed to overlook, things like Moby Dick, The Magic Mountain, and the other wonderful novels of Joseph Conrad which are not called Heart of Darkness.

Having acquired the taste, it is now one of the most satisfying feelings I can imagine to sit down and crack the covers on something that measures a couple of inches in thickness. I'm finally reading Shadow Country, Peter Matthieson's final version (900 pp.) of his legend about Mr. Watson, the backwoods killer who was shot down by his neighbors in the Florida Everglades.

And, just to keep things interesting, I've also started in on the three volumes of Shelby Foote's definitive account of the Civil War. Something wonderful happens when you realize the author will take as much time and space as it takes to give you the full picture. Thus we begin with two capsule biographies of Lincoln and Davis, the rival Presidents, and proceed at leisure up to the first conflict at Harper's Ferry.

The reader can sit back with a sigh, confident in the hundreds of pages remaining to unfold the whole tale, and comforted by the other two volumes still waiting on the shelf. When you're having this good a time, the best news you can hear are the words, "To be continued ..."

Hey - What's On Your Book?

I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours ...

A while back Apple Computer used to run some ads asking the question, "What do you have on your MacBook?" The results, posted by various celebrities, always seemed to include something like a draft of their novel/memoir/screenplay along with iMovies of the kids, their latest GarageBand album, complete financial history, etc., ad infinitum.

It occurs to me we could start asking people what they have on their eBook readers, whether they be Amazonian, Sonian, or Barnes & Noblean. I, for one, would be proud to show off the veritable library (well, at least one bookcase thereof) that I have on mine.

This corresponds to the shelf in my physical library of books-I-need-to-read-right-now. I usually delete the ones I've read, keeping copies of some on my desktop computer, so everything on the reader is either in progress or yet to be read. One of the wonderful things about these devices is how easy it is to read multiple books at the same time without being limited by how many you are willing to carry around with you. And it always remembers your place in each one.

This is my in-progress list:

Democracy in America - de Toqueville
Last of the Mohecans - Cooper
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
Cross Creek - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Stories from L'Morte d'Arthur
Short Stories by Henry James

Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson

And here's the wealth of others just waiting their turn:

On the Origin of Species - Darwin
Hard Times - Dickens
The Mutineers - Charles Hawes
3 Victorian novels by Charles John Cutliffe Wright Hyne (see my review about him)
The Water Babies - Kingsley
Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe
The Longest Journey - E.M. Forster
The Octopus - Frank Norris
Thus Spake Zarathustra - Nietsche
All Things Considered - G.K. Chesterton
Celt and Saxon - George Meredith
3 Western novels by Zane Gray
A Modern Utopia - H.G. Wells
4 novels by J. Fenimore Cooper, other than Last of the Mohecans
The American Scene and The Bostonians - Henry James
3 novels by Joseph Conrad (and none of them is Heart of Darkness)
Essays - Emerson
Plain Tales From the Hills - Kipling
2 novels by Olaf Stapledon
Maggie, A Girl of the Streets - Stephen Crane
The Virginians - Wm. Thackeray
The Voyage Out and Night and Day - Virginia Woolf
The Magician - Somerset Maugham
Leaves of Grass - Whitman
The Sonnets - Shakespeare
Boswell's Life of Johnson
Can Such Things Be? - Ambrose Bierce
Chrome Yellow - Aldous Huxley
Journal of the Plague Year - Defoe

If this doesn't whet your appetite, then you are not a reader of good books. Just two final comments:

(1) The amount of money I paid for these fine examples of literature is zero, zilch, nada. They are freely available online through Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks. You may have noticed that they all date from the period now comfortably in the public domain.

(2) It's true that I'm probably adding to the list faster than I'm deleting the ones I've read, but hey, I'm making progress. And there's plenty of room left in my reader, so bring them on!

(How about you? What's on your book?)

Atoms of Empire

Judging a book not by its cover but by the author's name ...

While browsing on one of my favorite sources for online books, Feedbooks.com, I stumbled across an obscure work called Atoms of Empire. The title caught my eye first, but what really hooked me was the name of the author: Charles John Cutliffe Wright Hyne. How's that for a mouthful? And what an epitome of Victorian respectability it captures in its ringing tones. That settled it. I had to see what Mr. C.J.C.W. Hyne had written.

The concept behind the title is that each individual is an indivisible atomic unit of the society as a whole. Specifically, in whatever far flung reaches of the globe they might find themselves, the intrepid subjects of the Crown were each a representative microcosm of the British Empire. Keep in mind that the work dates from the late 1890's when Victoria was still "Queen of England and Empress of India."

What follows in this collection of short fiction is a marvelous variety of period pieces ranging from droll plots hinging on matrimony to Indiana Jones-style adventures that stretch credulity to the breaking point.

In the opening story a priggish newcomer to an African colony decides to march into the jungle to impose law and order on the cannibal king, armed only with an umbrella. Having made himself universally unpopular, no one sees fit to prevent him from sallying forth to meet his fate.

Elsewhere various adventurers find themselves in the wilds of American swamps, falling victim to brazen train robberies, and fighting a cholera epidemic aboard ship. Then, on the fantastical side, we find out what lurks in an unexplored cave in the heart of the British Isles, and interview a mummy on the floor of an Egyptologist's study. Often the denouement of the story involves an encounter between two of the characters back home in Piccadilly or in the snug confines of their gentlemen's club.

What's enjoyable about these yarns is not just their dry wit but their unselfconscious belief in the triumph of pluck and daring-do. It's like watching old Hollywood movies where the writers, directors, and actors had absolutely no qualms about good triumphing over evil and America vanquishing fascism.

But more than just escape fiction, these stories have acquired a layer of historical interest for what they reveal about the attitudes of their intended readers. Racism, for example, is portrayed in a matter of fact way that has long since (thankfully) ceased being politically correct. Still, there is something refreshing about the use of the word "nigger" by someone who intended no insult by it. Now we are stuck with using the infantile phrase, "the N-word." That's progress for you.

There is precious little biographical information to be found about Hyne online, but in his day (1866-1944) he was a prolific popular novelist who cranked out a whopping 46 volumes during his career. There are a few others available on Feedbooks, including The Lost Continent, and still others thanks to the efforts of Google Books (check on Barnes and Noble), including the likes of Kate Meredith, Financier.

So if Atoms whets your appetite there is plenty to feast upon.

Long Live Big Brother!

1984 becomes the first unbook, but probably won't be the last ...


What a coincidence -- no sooner was the digital ink dry on my recent blog about the 25th anniversary of 1984 than Orwell's notorious novel made news again by disappearing from Amazon's Kindle readers everywhere. This must mean it's time to reflect once more about the issue of copyright and rights management in the digital era.

Apparently Amazon was notified by the legitimate copyright owners that their digital editions of 1984 and also Animal Farm had been obtained from an illegitimate third party source, so they were obliged to stop distributing them. What makes the story bizarre, and should put consumers on alert, is that Amazon went way beyond what was required of them and decided to use their "Whispernet" back door into all Kindles everywhere to recall (i.e., delete) all the copies that had been downloaded previously.

Customers received refunds, but were not even told that their books were now vanished as if they had never been. They had become "unbooks."

Now, as everyone should remember, Winston Smith, the diligent worker bee of Orwell's imaginary world, toiled away at his desk in the Ministry of Truth carefully excising past references to news that had been revised and people who had been done away with: "unpersons." He did this by pasting brown paper over their pictures in old newspapers, and by redacting the text until it resembled a passage of testimony on the Iran-Contra affair. The operative government slogan was: Who controls the present, controls the past. Who controls the past, controls the future.

But just when we thought we were safe because things have worked out differently, along comes this new digital technique capable of instantly removing all references to any digital content. The battle is not lost yet, because regardless of Amazon's deletions there are still lots of hard copies of Orwell out in the world, and perhaps some legitimate digital copies as well -- maybe even a fugitive one living on a Kindle somewhere, saved only because it is in some remote area of the planet where Whispernet cannot reach. But the example shows what is possible and should give us cause for concern.

With the immanent demise of the print editions of all newspapers, we will soon get used to the idea that our sole source for information is the digital archives of the Internet. And alas, the memory of online sources is brief and subject to loss and revision. Under a regime with the will to do so (let's pick China as an example), the nerve-nexuses of the Internet can be constricted, spying software can be installed on your computer by law, and what you can and cannot access can become very much a matter of centralized control.

And never mind deleting books or articles -- how about just revising them, perhaps while they are still being read? Remember that election last year where our editor lambasted the other party's candidate? Well, as you can see, you are mistaken, because he was clearly backing the winner from the start. Remember the famous photo of the young man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square? Well, your memory must be playing tricks on you, because you can search all day and you will never again find a copy of that photo.

Our defense against this potential tyranny is still vigilance, as always. The battle of information flow between the top-down central authority model and the bottom-up grass roots model gives hope that there is at least an alternative. But we also need to start choosing our battles while we can still win them. Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is still a winnable debate.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has stripped us of some basic rights that we used to take for granted when we bought a book or record. We need to make up our minds to resist. We can do it economically, by boycotting publishers and distributors who engage in practices we don't approve of, or politically, by demanding legislative change, or in courts, where organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are standing up on our behalf. (Check out their take on this issue here.)

One commentator on the irony of this fate befalling 1984 observed that it might have been even more ironic if it had happened to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, about a society that had burned all its books. But there is probably small chance of that happening as long as the publishers need to have something to sell us. Rights management is really about having a way to sell us the same thing multiple times, the way we are expected to pay every time we watch a movie.

I'm much more concerned about the possibility that the next time I read it there will be something funny about the ending of 1984. Winston Smith, bright and shiny after graduating from the rehab program in the basement of The Ministry of Love, joins the Anti-Sex league with his pal Julia. They move into a plush new apartment suitable for Inner Party members and live happily ever after. Winston can't imagine what ever got into him to question things the way he did. But that's all in the past now, where it can be safely ... revised.

The Format Wars

We're having the Miami Book Fair this weekend (report next time), so here's something that affects the future of books, and why you should care how your documents are stored ...

A struggle for world domination has been going on in recent years that will affect your ability to read and write digital documents, whether they are your own or the property of others. 

The most prominent example is the battle between Microsoft's ubiquitous Office formats (consider the chutzpah it takes to trademark the word "office") and the alternative Open Document standard as proposed by a consortium of other companies, individuals, and organizations, and certified by the ISO. There is an old gag among computer hackers that says, "a standard is a good thing, so it's a good thing there are so many of them." The joke of course is that with enough different standards there is no standard at all.

That particular struggle is still unresolved at this point. Microsoft has managed to have their own proposal for an "open" format adopted as a second standard by the ISO, but neglected to fully support it even in their own software, leaving us with a "standard" that no one can use except theoretically. (Joseph Heller must be rolling over in his grave at this example of a Catch 22.)

Meanwhile the opposition -- represented by OpenOffice.org, Sun's StarOffice, and IBM's Lotus Symphony (all free and compatible) -- forges ahead by supporting both Open Documents and the proprietary Microsoft Office formats that people actually use, thus building a bridge across the troubled waters for anyone who wants to take it. In case you can't tell, I count myself in that category.

A footnote to this is that OpenOffice.org and its brethren also support saving documents as Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format). If you wonder why Microsoft until recently required third party software to support this widely used feature, you only have to look as far as Microsoft's own answer to PDF -- the XML Paper Specification, or XPS, which they would prefer people to use instead of Acrobat, which is owned by a competitor. However at the moment XPS requires Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Windows, which kind of defeats the goal of making an electronic document universally readable.

By now you can see where this is going. Governments and big corporations are not the only ones who should be concerned about how their digital documents are archived. The issue of whether and for how long those documents will be readable is something we all have an interest in, whether as small businesses, students, writers, citizens, or anyone who has anything to save on a computer -- which pretty soon will include every last one of us. If your data format dies because your chosen software is driven out of existence by market forces, it is definitely a problem.

We know the nightmare can happen, because it has happened already. Long ago many law offices standardized on WordPerfect because at the time it was the only product that gave them the features they needed for legal documents. But now WordPerfect is struggling to survive in the face of the Microsoft juggernaut on one side and free competitors on the other. If and when it dies, an unknown number of critical legal documents may become unreadable, or garbled by imperfect (no pun intended) conversion programs.

As a writer I have had to migrate my work from the old DOS-based PC-Write to Lotus Ami-Pro, then through two semi-compatible versions of WordPro, and finally two versions of OpenOffice. (The first one was before the new standard.) And this is within a period of 25 years -- an average of just five years per format.

Even those who have exclusively used Microsoft's Word (there's that chutzpah again) will find that they can no longer read their oldest documents unless they have converted them as they went along and new versions came out. Coming up with new formats has proved to be an excellent marketing tool, since it forces all users to buy new software so they can read documents created by others who have bought it already. But clearly what works for the vendor does not work for the consumer.

And Now eBooks

Meanwhile a new front has opened in the arena of electronic publishing. Due to the understandable desire of publishers and authors to protect their work from piracy, an assortment of new standards for Digital Rights Management (or DRM) have sprung up, along with a separate assortment of file formats that work with one or another version of DRM. Unfortunately the result is that hacker joke all over again. (Here's a comparison between the various formats so you can see how bewildering the assortment is.)

Just as with music, when you acquire an ebook you have to choose one of the available formats, and this choice will determine what computers and other devices you will be able to read it with. After that there are many ways to lose access to what you thought you owned. Your format of choice may become obsolete so that it is no longer supported by newer devices. Your computer may die or be stolen, forcing you to plead for a replacement license for a new machine. Or the format that you like on your computer may not work with your phone or PDA or the new reader from Amazon or [insert vendor of your choice].

About the best you can do is to avail yourself of DRM-free documents in a form that is as widely supported as possible. There are many sources for works that are either in the public domain or which have been made available by their authors as freely distributable while remaining under copyright.

In the latter case you are free to read and share them, but not to sell them without arrangement with the author. Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling are notable examples of writers who have chosen to "give away" at least some of their work in this way, while continuing to sell traditional books in print form. It is arguably a way to insure wide readership which may in the long run enhance sales.

Free At Last

Alas, even with freely distributable texts there are problems. Since I acquired my Sony Reader last Christmas I've become all too familiar with them.

Project Gutenberg, the first attempt at creating a free library of public domain books, made an early choice to use "plain text" as their format in order to make their books as widely accessible as possible. (Now they are also using HTML and PDF for some books, and even audio -- a whole other can of worms.) While this avoids the pitfalls of those word processors of yore that are no longer with us, it leaves their online books as "plain vanilla" with no ability to use bold or italics or different fonts, and no diagrams or illustrations.

Worse still, their texts have embedded line breaks that make them difficult to adjust for different display sizes. Removing those line breaks can be difficult or impossible depending on what software you use and what your level of expertise is -- and yes, it is maddening that something so simple should be so hard.

In practice this means that when I read a Gutenberg document on my
Sony with its 5x7 page, there
is no combination of font size or orientation that matches where the line
breaks are. It doesn't mean I can't
read it anyway, but it's esthetically unpleasant. (Like this paragraph.)

PDF files can suffer similar problems, because they were not originally meant to have text that would reflow if the page size was changed.

One example of a new solution is the Epub format, created by the International Digital Publishing Forum and supported by Sony and an assortment of other vendors and online distributors like Feedbooks. It is able to handle fonts, page reflow, and even graphics, which makes epub documents a pleasure to read. However, at this point it is yet another new standard -- and the same old joke applies. Come to think of it, they work fine on my Sony Reader, but I didn't have any software that would recognize them on my PC until I downloaded and installed Adobe's Digital Editions.

Hey, wait a minute -- can you still read this? If so, it's because of the universal use of HTML (hypertext markup language) for text on web pages, which is a perfect demonstration of what a true standard can offer us. Let's hope we can someday agree on another one for books and plain old documents.

In Praise of the Book

"But what's going to happen to all the books?" asked my friend ...

Having praised the new breed of digital book readers, I'd like to take a step back and argue the opposite case. First off, isn't it a bit of a misnomer to call these devices "readers?" To paraphrase the slogan of pro-gun lobbyists, "Computers don't read books, people read books." All these devices do is show them to us; we still have to read them. They should be called "viewers" or "displayers," but that is way too dull to ever catch on, so we are probably doomed to call them readers from now on. Soon the noun "reader" will come to mean the thing, not the person who reads, and instead of "reading" we will end up "readering" our books.

Of course it's a good thing that we still have to read, and that we have so much material available both from the present and the past. It's also an advantage that the size of our personal libraries will no longer be limited by the amount of windowless wall space we are willing to devote to bookshelves in our homes. But two incidents have forced me to look again at what we are losing in the transition.

The first one was a visit with my high school English teacher and personal mentor, Harry. For years I've been telling him that digital books are on the way, and how great that will be. Some time ago I showed him a laptop computer with text on the screen just to give him an idea, but he was unimpressed. Even though this machine was probably outweighed by the Oxford English Dictionary, it seemed way too heavy and clunky to him--not the sort of thing you would curl up in bed with before going to sleep.

Even though I know people who would do that, I had to concede his point. I also knew that his attention span would far outlast any available battery (we're talking Marcel Proust), and the idea of having to be plugged in while you read was a non-starter. But just wait, I told him, they're getting smaller and lighter all the time ...

So naturally I had to show off my cute little Sony when I got one. Small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, able to go weeks without a charge, lighter than a hardbound book, holding enough reading matter for an entire summer vacation ... it's Superbook!

"But," he said, his faced lined with concern, "what's going to happen to all the books?"

It's easy to dismiss this attitude as clinging to the past. Who would want to go back to the days of cassette tapes or vinyl LP's or player-piano rolls now that we have digital recording technology? Or, perhaps a better analogy, why would we copy a book by hand once the printing press has been invented? Or use a typewriter instead of a word processor?

But his feelings were not just nostalgia for the past. They came from a form of fetishism familiar to anyone who has ever loved a good book. Through the act of reading them these objects become parts of ourselves, as well as talismans representing their authors and the worlds of imagination contained within them. It's no accident that a staple of children's fiction is the magic book, one whose cover is a door into an enchanted other realm.

I remember a friend saying of a cherished volume of short stories, "I'm carrying it around like it's my velveteen rabbit." Is it possible we will ever feel the same way about our ebook readers, whose covers are always the same regardless of what text they contain, and whose pages never get dogeared and fly-spotted from use? Even the yellowing paper of an old book speaks to us of its age and lends import to its counsel.

The second incident involved Jack Kerouac. I've rediscovered him more than once since the first time, when I was in high school. This time it was due to a reading at our favorite bookstore, Books & Books, by John Leland, who has written Why Kerouac Matters. I won't tell you why if you don't know already, but I can say that the best thing about the reading was that it sent me back to read Kerouac again. Consulting my bookshelves (they occupy two of my windowless walls) I selected a battered copy of The Subterraneans, the same one I had bought and read while still in school so many years ago when it was newly published in paperback by Grove Press with a cover price of $1.45. (Let's not forget the fetishism of publishers, too.)

This book, containing some of Jack's most powerful and lively stream-of-consciousness prose, details--dissects might be a better word--his brief affair with a black woman who was going off her rocker in the hipster subculture of 1950's San Francisco. It was actually made into one of Hollywood's most atrocious movies (mercifully NOT available from Netflix) in which the part of Leo/Jack was played by George Peppard and his lover, Mardou, by the not only white but blond Leslie Caron, which kind of shows how they missed the whole point. In spite of a terrific jazz soundtrack by Andre Previn, featuring Gerry Mulligan and Carmen MacRae, I can only recommend that you read it, not watch it.

So one day this week that's what I was doing. I carried it into Chick'n Grill at lunchtime and had it on my tray while I paid. The cover caught the eye of the young woman at the register--The Subterraneans in big bold letters with the rough shape of the Golden Gate Bridge giving a sense of location.

"What's your book about?" she asked. In the moment that it took me to think how to answer, I noted the flash of intelligence in her eyes, and felt a sense of pride in the democratic lifestyle that spreads our culture widely, however thin it may be.

"The Beat Generation," I replied.

"The what?"

"You know, the beatniks? Back before the hippies?"

"Oh. Was that you?" A mischievous smile, letting me know my age.

"No, that was before me."

"What were they like?"

"Well, they were pretty far out."

She laughed, and took my money, and I took my book to eat with me. There it was, my own name on the inside of the cover, written in my teenage hand. My pencil underlines were still to be found, and occasional notes of appreciation in the margins -- the record of myself cheering the author on like a jazz aficionado shouting "Go!" and "Yeah!" during the sax solo, exactly what Kerouac's fondest wish had been.

This book and I were old friends. The experience of renewing our acquaintance was more than just taking in the words again, it was touching a part of my past. And it was an experience I could never have in digital form. Nor would that young woman have thought to ask what the book was about if all she had seen was the blank leatherette cover of my reader. When people see that they are more likely to ask, "What is it?" rather than "What are you reading?"

So here's to the lowly book. Though it may come to be regarded as a Dead Sea Scroll, or a cuneiform clay tablet, and though it may be on its way into oblivion, let's honor it and think fondly of it as we set it gently on the shelf of history.

America Revisited

Campaign season -- a perfect time to reflect on our history ...

You might think with a high-tech gadget like the Sony ebook reader I got for Christmas that the first things I would try it out on would be science fiction or computer programming texts. But instead I cashed in on the free classics that Sony lets you download. So three of the first books I read were about visits to America in the 19th century--works that were between 117 and 165 years old. (Note to publishers: good books have a long life; they are not like this month's hit songs.)

Dickens

First of these travelogs was Charles Dickens' American Notes, an account of his visit to the States in the 1840's. It begins with a hilarious diatribe about the extremely small size of the "state room" that he and his wife shared on their voyage across--a sentence that seems to go on for pages, during which the room continually shrinks as the sense of humor expands. From there it becomes more somber as we are reminded how arduous and perilous such voyages were, even in the early days of the steamship. And it echoes the experience of countless immigrants who made the same voyage. To cross the Atlantic then was to give oneself up for lost, and hope to be reborn at the other end of the passage.

Upon landing in Boston, being Dickens, his first order of business was to examine the institutions for the poor, sick, and infirm. The facilities of Boston passed with flying colors, and are held up as examples of their kind. It would seem that in our earlier days our nation established standards which we have forgot to maintain. If we ourselves could go back and see what was being done in the 1840's it would be hard to say where we have made any progress since, and easy to see where we have fallen behind--particularly in the area of mental health care.

One notable example is an institute for the blind, many of them children. Dickens spends a great deal of time on a single case, a girl who lost her sight, hearing, sense of smell, and most of her sense of taste due to illness at the age of three. I confess my imagination fails to be able to encompass such a degree of isolation--to think of being a mere child, lost alone in the silent dark.

Several years later the girl was brought to this establishment where the doctor, much like the woman who taught Helen Keller many years later, managed to teach her to recognize letters carved of wood, to assemble letters into words, that words had meanings and could be used to communicate, and finally how to make signs for the letters using her fingers. She quickly became proficient at this, and was able to make friends and to play with the children around her, who were merely blind. She even learned how to sew and to knit, if you can believe that.

Having accomplished all this, the doctor told Dickens that his next task was going to be to try to give the girl some conception of God. Only then did he seem to think his responsibility would be fulfilled and his work complete. It's hard to imagine a modern doctor taking this point of view. He would probably call in a specialist if he did anything at all. But I think it speaks well for this Victorian-era doctor that he would take on the challenge of treating the whole person, not just the symptoms, and that he recognized the paramount importance of the spiritual element of being human.

The remainder of Dickens' wandering about the country is more protracted. He visits New York, Buffalo, Chicago, and lower Canada, and treats us to a poetic evocation of Niagara Falls. Everywhere he goes, he visits hospitals and prisons and whatever other such institutions are available, though not all of them live up to the high standard of the ones he encountered in Boston. He also visits the brand new capital city of Washington, D.C., which apart from the public buildings is not much more than a sprawling construction site.

At this fringe of the South he first encounters the institution of slavery. The importation of slaves had been banned by this time, but this did not prevent slave owners from breeding their captives like cattle and continuing to trade in them within the country's boundaries. Needless to say, it was a practice that Dickens took a dim view of.

One of the most powerful parts of the book is a compilation of advertisements that he culled from Southern newspapers. Each contains a description of a runaway slave that the owner is seeking recovery of, and each describes the marks of physical torture that will identify his property--ears missing, brands on the face, whip scars on the back, hobbled limbs, an endless litany of abuse. Any wonder why they tried to escape?

Having praised us, Dickens lays this burden on our doorstep, claiming we will never be a great nation so long as the shame of slavery hangs about our necks.

Trollope

This is a perfect segue into the second book, North America, by Anthony Trollope. The novelist followed in Dickens' footsteps about 20 years later, in 1861-2, when the country had fallen into civil war between the free and slave states. From the outset the author gives us his own prediction of the outcome. He believes that eventually the South will be established as an independent nation regardless of the outcome of the war, because the cultural differences between North and South are too great to be overcome, and because he cannot imagine that the North would readmit the seceded states to membership in the Union in the wake of all out war.

Modern readers know that he was wrong in this, but it demonstrates the magnitude of what the country has accomplished over the long years of Reconstruction and eventually up through the Civil Rights period. It may have taken more than a century, but an African-American now stands as a front runner for the presidency and even garners wide support throughout the former Confederate States. It also reminds us that the institution of slavery, once so widely held to be inevitable, has been done away with--at least within our borders. Any modern instances are rightly treated as corporate malfeasance or bizarre crimes akin to rape and serial murder. And whatever evils may remain in the form of prejudice or injustice are nothing compared to how monstrous it used to be.

Though he came along later than Dickens, Trollope still visited in a time when he could claim to have explored North America by going no further south than Washington (still acres of mud and still under construction), no further north than lower Canada, and no further West than St. Louis. He, too, visited Niagara Falls, and left behind a lyrical depiction of the experience as lush as any period oil painting by a great master--far exceeding in breadth and depth the comments of his predecessor.

In all he is an admirable observer. Learning that a detachment of Union soldiers is about to disembark from a riverboat, he has to stand by the gangway to see the men's faces and take their measure as they file past. Not content to collect statistics or to rely on interviews, he has to stand in the middle of a grain elevator as it transfers its river of wheat from a barge on one side to railway cars on the other--a process that went on 24/7 during harvest time--gaining a visceral experience of what millions of bushels feel like.

Like Dickens, Trollope had no love for slavery, yet he seems to consider it likely to continue indefinitely in the South, and to have few hopes for those who might be liberated in the border states. (His belief was that the North would take control of Kentucky, Tennessee, Kansas, Missouri, and maybe even Virginia and the Carolinas, leaving the "Gulf States" their independence with slavery intact.) In fact, his speculation about the inability of freed slaves to care for themselves reveals all the traditional bigotry that we associate today with racism.

Also like Dickens, he was concerned that his many criticisms of America and its social order would outweigh his equally strong praises for what he found good and admirable. The closing chapter is largely an apology and an appeal to his many American friends to understand the spirit of his remarks.

Kipling

The young Rudyard Kipling seems to have felt himself under no such restraints when he published his own American Notes in 1891. Fresh off the boat from India (by then you could cross the Pacific in about three weeks and relative comfort) he lands in San Francisco with poison pen at the ready, and begins lashing out immediately at journalists, city planners, advertising, accents, culture or the lack thereof, and anything else that forced itself upon his attention.

An editor's forward to this slim volume explains that it has been out of print for many years and is seldom listed in bibliographies of Kipling's work, largely because of the negative reaction to it by American readers. Also, I suspect Kipling later regretted his acid tone. We know that he married an American woman, lived for some years in Vermont, and purchased a lovely piece of property there. Presumably he moderated his opinions over time.

The book has an unfinished feel to it, as if he left off in the middle and never got back to it. At the outset he tells us that he is traversing the country from West to East, rather than the usual reverse direction, yet the narrative leaves off at Chicago. There, instead of standing in a grain elevator, he witnesses the assembly line slaughter of pigs, presaging Sandburg's depiction of the city as "hog butcher to the world."

Still, the story has its bright moments. In one chapter Kipling rhapsodizes over a salmon fishing trip outside of Portland (then part of California). Like a youthful Hemingway he revels in the struggle of the sport, the glory of the outdoors, the brotherhood with his companions. The sense of satisfaction seems to outweigh all the negative impressions he collected in the city, and he claims he could now die happy and complete.

Visiting The Past

The wonderful thing about the past is that you can visit it, walk its empty streets and peer through its boarded up windows. You can pluck its newspapers from the trash and discover what was going on, how it looked and felt to those who lived there.

Each of these books places the reader into the body of its author for a first person encounter with America the way it was. Perhaps we are still as touchy about criticism, both pro and con, as we were back then. I confess my chest swelled when both Dickens and Trollope commended us for teaching everyone how to read, and observed that all Americans did so avidly, consuming multiple daily newspapers and myriads of books that dwarfed the per capita sales in England. If we have fallen away from that golden age it is only because we have moved on, ever restless, to consuming information in forms that did not exist in the 19th century. (And if you think TV is bad, you should read what Trollope has to say about our newspapers.)

On the other hand, my lips curled in disgust and shame over the depictions of universal tobacco chewing and consequent spitting that darkened the sidewalks, floors, and carpets everywhere--even in the halls of the Capitol. I suppose we replaced this national habit with cigarette smoking, and are now trying to wean ourselves from that. But we can certainly be glad that the spittoon is a fixture of the past.

Charles Dickens made another visit to America in 1868--twenty-five years after his first one, six years after Trollope, and three years after the end of the Civil War. Addressing members of the press, he expressed his admiration for how far the country had advanced in this time, particularly in ridding itself of the scourge of slavery. Indeed, he promised to add these remarks as a postscript to his earlier book, and to instruct his publishers that they must be included in all future printings.

Little did he imagine that 140 years later those words would still be included in a digital text that could be obtained anywhere through a global network of wires and painted page by page on a reading device he could only have considered magical. Kind of makes me wish I could return the favor and invite Dickens to see us now through my own eyes. But the deal only works in one direction.

[All three of these books can be downloaded free of charge from Project Gutenberg.]

Optons, Kindles, and eBooks

In his novel, Return from the Stars, Polish sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem imagined a device called an “opton.” It was a “book” with a single page into which you would plug a small crystal containing whatever book you wanted to read, and the text would then appear on the page, along with places you could touch to display other pages. (You can read his description here.)

Sound familiar? As with much of the science fiction paraphernalia of a few decades ago (this one dates from the 1960's) the device has quickly popped into reality about a century ahead of schedule. Today's ebooks may not have pages exactly, but thinner and more flexible displays that would resemble them are already in development. And Lem failed to foresee that not only a book but a whole library could fit into a much smaller chip than he had in mind, and that the device would be able to wirelessly acquire new material for itself, and thus to function as a newspaper as well.

That last feature, of course, belongs to Amazon's new Kindle reader, the latest in a series of progressively better attempts to redefine the book for the digital age. I will refrain from giving yet another review of this device, because the Internet is crawling with them already. However, I have to share my experience with its chief competitor, the Sony eBook Reader, which came as a wonderful Christmas gift from my wife.

Sony's been in this game longer than Amazon, and this year's model has technical improvements over last year's. But they haven't done nearly so well at marketing it. Amazon may have done Sony a big favor here by “kindling” (you knew it was coming, didn't you?) interest in the concept. [There is also an impressive reader called the Iliad from iRex, a spinoff of Phillips, which boasts more bells and whistles but a price tag twice as high as Sony's.]

Which of these devices you prefer has more to do with how you like to select your reading material than what it is like to read on them. They both have comparable “epaper” screens that present black on off-white text which you read by reflected light, like a normal page. They have a resolution at least double that of a computer screen, making the text sharper and easier on the eye. Unlike computer screens, the legibility of these displays is actually improved by good light-- even sunlight--again, like a real page. And because they only draw power while the page is being drawn, they have unbelievable battery life--about 2 weeks even with heavy reading. You really don't even have to think about it, it's not going to die on you. And unlike trying to read on a laptop computer, your legs don't get hot.

In short, if you are at all interested in trying this new way to read, there is no longer any reason to wait for a better solution. No doubt the pages will continue to get bigger and more clear, and the devices will continue to offer new features, but they are already good enough for years of use. And there is plenty to read, even for free. Project Gutenberg alone could keep the most avid reader busy for many years, and publishers are getting more interested in putting out digital versions of current titles.

Which brings us to the subject of Digital Rights Management, or DRM, and the reason I prefer Sony's reader. DRM, of course, is how content providers (AKA publishers) will prevent you from passing along your used ebooks to friends, hospitals, thrift shops, and used bookstores, as you have been doing throughout the rest of your life. Henceforth, they hope, you will be satisfied to email a link to the book's web page to your friends, encouraging ever more sales. In exchange for this, they will discount the price you and your friends will have to pay for each copy.

Whether this brave new world will pan out as intended is still a matter of ongoing debate. Even though it rubs many the wrong way, myself included, I have to admit that if I am willing to pay half the cover price for a used paper book then I should be willing to pay something comparable for a new digital one. But it still bothers me that I won't be able to rush up to a friend, full of enthusiasm, and press it into his or her hands with the admonition, “You've just GOT to read this!”

I'm sorry, but an email suggesting that they hurry out and buy one is not the same. I guess we'll just have to get used to treating books the way we do movies.

The other downside of DRM is that it requires infrastructure that gets between you and the book. This comes in the form of software that has to be installed on your computer (in the case of Sony) to “authorize” you to download from their ebook store and control which devices, including your computer and your ebook reader, will be allowed to view the book. As we know, the best laid software “gang aft aglee,” so there has to be customer support, in the event your privileges are lost, to get them restored--which sounds a lot like having your voting rights given back after you are no longer a felon.

See, I have this nightmare. In it, I walk into my living room where all the books I've collected throughout my life, and have not culled out through periodic moving and cleanup, lie in state on their shelves, with a moderate degree of organization so I can usually find the one I'm looking for when I want it. But in this dream I select a book and open it, only to discover its pages are either blank or filled with gibberish. Frantic, I place a call to the bookstore (not the publisher), and find myself in tech support hell. It seems they no longer have a record that I ever bought that book (after all, it was years ago), so they are sorry, but I will have to buy a new copy if I want to read it again. Then I discover the same thing has happened to the rest of my library. At this point I wake up in a cold sweat.

Amazon has taken this a step further by electing to use a proprietary format for everything you read on your Kindle. That means, in case you're wondering, that if you have a PDF or text file you'd like to read, even a draft of your own novel, you have to email it to Amazon where, for the modest fee of ten cents per file, they will convert it for you and send it back. This puts my nightmare to shame – now I can't even read my own handwriting without permission!

Sony has been generous enough to let me read my own stuff, at least text files and PDF's, without paying extra for the privilege--at least so far. And this, combined with a lower selling price, makes their reader my preferred choice. [The Iliad does this too.] Though it lacks the Kindle's magical ability to grab Amazon's contents from thin air, at least I can plug it in and put whatever I want on it, including a wealth of free books from Project Gutenberg. Such a wealth, in fact, that I will have to write more about it in weeks to come.

Until then, happy reading, whatever the format of your choice.