You Will Read a Dark Stranger: How We Read Today and Yesterday

The change from scroll to codex (aka “Book”) must have been a bit by bit business.

At first, only Christians had codices for their “gospels.”  Then, as the Christians multiplied, this new format began to show up in the bookstalls, at first only Christian material, then Christian oriented material, then all sorts of regular topics, and finally even the dear poets and rhetoricians you read in youth. Times they were changing. After a while, you bought a few of the square whatsits (you were baptized then, on the advice of your district manager), and soon your library was full of them. But they seemed . . . low.

Some people, while admitting the advantages of this new technology, rather missed scrolls. They liked winding through a scroll. There was a certain nescio quid about scrolls.

History suggests that there was a similar consumer reluctance to the change from manuscript codices to printed books. Print was first mostly used for publicity bills and announcements.  Printed books were considered a little . . . low, actually. Rather mechanical, you know. Suggestive of trade.

On the desk in front of us, is a small machine of black plastic, four and a half inches wide and about six and a half inches long. It is about a quarter inch thick. The breadth of hand can hold it easily. The plastic gleams dully. Its edges are comfortably beveled, and it weights less than a trade paperback. In the center of one side is a clear plastic screen, three and a half inches by about five inches. At the moment the screen shows a black and white image of fountain pens (why not scrolls?). On the lower edge of the device is a very small button. When the button is pressed, the fountain pens disappear, and the images of the covers of seven books appear.

This is a Kindle Paperwhite, one of a range of e-readers now available.

We have used this little tool for about a week, and we can report pleasure, surprise, and a certain unease.

A little assessment, therefore.  What we have is a Kindle, but the Sony and the Kobo are much the same. They participate in the form.

To begin, the virtue of a tool, in itself, is whether it does what its maker claims it will. The Vice-grip says it will hold, and does. The Edsel said it would impress the neighbors, and didn’t.

On this point, The Kindle works pretty well.

The battery has good length and is easily rechargeable.

The text on the screen – this is a business end of the Kindle – is dead clear, with no fuzz at all. The engineers have nailed this.

The commands for using the Kindle are all brought up by tapping, here and there on the touch screen. They take a little getting used to, but are reasonably convenient. At times, a small touch keyboard is brought up. It works, otherwise . . . meh.

Getting books (can we still call them books?) for your device is simple, once the user sets up an Amazon account. Items load in a remarkably short time.  Amazon boasts a huge range of available titles – 204,895 for political science alone. But more on this point in a few paragraphs.

So, as a tool and a system to back it up, the engineers at Amazon may take a bow. Nicely done, ladies and gentlemen.

It is while using the Kindle that mild surprises come along.

It is surprising how sharply the convenience strikes one of being able to have a lot of books with you at the same time.

At the moment on our machine are: a Greek New Testament, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, Allen’s middle Egyptian grammar (a work that should be in every respectable parlor) Legge’s Analects (ditto), and Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. This is ten pounds of books, if stuffed into a side bag or a suitcase. If one is looking to read on the subway it makes a big difference.  And, you can easily switch back and forth between texts and the Kindle will keep tabs on your last page. Nice, very nice in fact. The average person can begin to emulate that Arab Sheik who traveled everywhere with two thousand books loaded on twenty-three camels . . .

There is an unexpectedness as to light.

When one reads a book, there are three parties involved, yourself, the book, and the environment with its lighting. The Kindle (and the Sony and the Kobo too) brings its own light with it.  A book just sits there. An E-reader is an active player, and this makes a difference. But to define the difference, well, we wish we had a certain Austrian-American philosopher to ask.

It also strikes one that with a Kindle you are dealing with one page at a time.  In a book, not only is the other page of the two page spread immediately there, but all the other pages are present as physical reality in their bulk and weight.  Everyone knows by the thinning slice of unread pages, as he or she reads a biography, about how long the subject has to live. There is none of that here.

This is a change we find piquant. In a way, it moves one closer to the experience of hearing a book, rather than reading it. No doubt, in a few years it will read itself aloud.

Finally there are a few points that unsettle one.

Amazon, a corporation whose thirst for market domination would impress Qin Shi Huang, provides, as we said, a wide range of titles.  But when one looks at the situation a little more closely, one notices that most of the titles are from the last twenty years. It was about twenty years ago that publishers began putting their home copies of books on computers and generating hard copies by using computer typesetting. If a book is already digitized, it is cheap enough to turn out an E-book. If not? It had better be in strong demand and public domain.  We are happy to report that some Voegelin has made the cut. But older, narrower material is not so available.

The last time we had a filter like this we were moving from majuscule to minuscule writing, or from vinyl to CDs.

An aspect yet more disquieting. Amazon e-books will only work on the Kindle. Sometimes this strikes one sharply. Canadian readers should note that no Kindle usable items are available from Canadian Public Libraries, at least not unless you have the Kindle Fire, which is a tablet machine and a good deal more expensive.

Now as an instance of Human Wickedness, this is small. But we now have two or three very large corporations standing between the reader and the publisher. And if we know anything about corporations, it is that they do not stand still. They are always doing stuff. New stuff. The Greeks complained about the Athenians, as to the same point.

There is nothing per se sinister about the Kindle, and much to be admired.

But and but it is a new tool, and we don’t know quite what to make of it now, philosophically, and we don’t know what it will develop into in the next years. Is it from heaven or from man?  How long will it be before someone writes something designed for reading only on the Kindle, perhaps on the Kindle 2020 with its host of unexpected and aggressive features?

Ever in our mind echoes the remark of C.S. Lewis that an increase in man’s power over nature usually comes to an increase in the power of some men over other men.

Or, as Larry Niven points out somewhere, the better the tool, the better the weapon.

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