5 Arguments For the Continued Viability of the Book

I take a lot of six-hour plane flights, and am usually reading multiple books at any given time. Which makes me an ideal target customer for Amazon's new Kindle e-book reader. Lugging even one hardcover book on a trip is a hassle; the Kindle can contain the equivalent of hundreds of 'em in a package that's slimmer than a typical paperback.

So I'm intrigued by the idea, at the very least--and plan to try the $399 EVDO-enabled Kindle out shortly to see just how good the reading experience is. (We'll also have a review up shortly by my colleague Melissa Perenson--who, like many people who have gotten their hands on the device, found both plenty to like and plenty to quibble about.)

Meanwhile, I've been ruminating on Steven Levy's long article about the Kindle in the current Newsweek. Actually, Levy's piece is only partly about the Kindle--it's about where digital technology could be taking books. Technology could put all the books ever written into one Kindle-like device; it could turn books from static, unchanging items into ones that are subject to continuous evolution; it could make them conversations rather than one-way transfers of ideas from author to reader.

Actually, I'm pretty positive that it'll do all these things, given time, since that scenario just isn't very distant from what the Web has done to information of all kinds in a little over a decade.

But thinking about how books might change has me thinking about all the ways I hope they never change--or at least, all the ways in which traditional old dead-tree books have an edge on e-books as they're likely to exist in the near future. After all...

They're the most customized containers for information ever. Like all e-book readers, the Kindle squeezes any book you load into it onto a screen whose dimensions can never change. And I understand that it supports only two typefaces. Ordinary books, by contrast, can be produced in whatever size best fits their content--so tiny they'll fit in a shirtpocket, or so mammoth that they occupy most of a coffee table. Whole categories of books, like collections of comic strips that need extra-wide, landscape-oriented pages, just won't work on an e-reader.

Same thing for typefaces--one of my favorite books, Walter Kerr's The Silent Clowns, on silent comedy, is set in a wonderfully old-timey, playful font; it simply wouldn't be as good a read on an e-book reader.

They're still the benchmark for reproduction of images. Neither the Kindle nor its closest competition, the Sony Reader, does color at all, since the high-contrast, battery-efficient e-ink technology they use doesn't support it. That's a striking limitation in a world in which even the cheapest cell phone has a color screen. There will, of course, be e-books with color screens at some point, but I'm not sure if there will ever be ones that can make art reproductions look as good as they do when they consist of ink on wood pulp.

Unidirectional is not a dirty word. I don't want anyone "improving" Picasso's Guernica. I think the works of Gilbert and Sullivan don't need extra music or new lyrics. And I want authors of both fiction and nonfiction to have the ability to write books that are 100% them, and which don't change unless they decide they should change.

I don't mean to sound like a fuddy-duddy--I'm thrilled by the interactivity that's inherent in the Web and which printed magazines can never duplicate. But magazines have always been about multiple voices; most of the greatest books ever written are one masterful voice saying exactly the things it wants to.

Books were meant to be shared. The Kindle is yet another electronic device that's hobbled by copy protection: You can't give a Kindle e-book as a gift, or lend it to a friend without lending them the Kindle itself. That takes a large chunk of the social aspect out of the reading experience.

But printed books effectively have the world's best copy protection--the fact they're physical prevents people from (easily) copying them, but doesn't stop anyone from lending them or giving them away. And me, I like giving books to friends almost as much as I like reading them. I like lending out favorites, too--as long as it's to someone who's likely to return 'em at some point.

Books are permanent, or as close to permanent as information gets. Want to read one that was published hundreds of years ago? The pages may be a bit yellowed, but the volume will be just as easy to access as it was the day it rolled off the printing press. Kindle books, however, come in a proprietary AZW format that works only on the Kindle, and which leaves you dependent on Amazon for content. If Amazon is in business four hundred years from now selling AZW books, it would be utterly extraordinary; if the Kindle is no more successful than previous e-books, it's possible that AZW won't be around just a few years from now.

I could go on, and I'm not even bothering with the obvious stuff, like the fact that a $10 paperback doesn't require a $400 investment to read it, or the printed word's amazing ability to work for indefinite periods without the need for any electrical power whatsoever.

It's a trite sentiment, but it's true: If we had only e-books and paper books were invented and released in late 2007, there's much about them that would be pretty darn amazing...