Kindling

At a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, I watched with bewilderment as a novelist I admire declared, without apparent irony, that "The Kindle is evil." It should have been easy to ignore so foolish a statement, but this author was scarcely alone in expressing antipathy for Amazon's popular electronic book. A table in the Green Room, with a slightly forbidding "Reserved for Amazon Kindle" sign, sat unoccupied, and was the object of much free-floating scorn and fear.

Since then, I've been thinking about the hysteria that I continue to encounter from otherwise sensible writers when the subject turns to Kindles. The literary world has always had its Luddites - we're famous for them, in fact. We embrace them. (Writers who write longhand always proudly advertise this fact.)

Take Sven Birkerts, the justly respected author and critic. In 2007, well after blogs and bloggers had entered the mainstream, he fretted about the web's "libidinally undifferentiated miasma of yearnings and gratifications" in the Boston Globe. And just a few months ago, in an essay in The Atlantic entitled "Resisting the Kindle," he worried that "as Wikipedia is to information, so will the Kindle become to literature ..."

I'm not unsympathetic to some of Birkert's concerns - there is much to fret about with regard to diminishing attention spans and contextual awareness, and, as the owner of a considerable library of cloth, paper and glue, I need no convincing about the beauty and value of the book.

But authors screaming about the Kindle - well that's just plain stupid. There's no other word for it.

And here's why: The old models of publishing are dying. There's not a single writer I speak to who isn't terrified about where his or her audience is to be found. We're all morosely aware of a critical mass of factors including fewer review outlets, more published books than ever before, less available shelf space, strapped advertising budgets, and dispiriting sales as consumers move to other entertainment outlets. So what rational reason could a writer offer for closing such a potentially rich avenue for reaching his or her next reader?

Odious as the tobacco companies are, they were highly effective in their relentless pursuit of "replacement smokers." (Remember "Joe Camel"?) They hooked their next generation of customers by going to where young people could be found and repackaging their product to make it appealing.

I think we can all agree that hooking young people on literature is a considerably more laudable goal, and so it seems absurdly self-destructive for any author to cut himself off from a generation that doesn't share our romanticism about paper, a generation that is entirely content receiving information electronically.

And speaking of odious, it's not as though Amazon is beyond criticism - any publisher will tell you that their business practices border on the predatory. (Their recent plan to pay bloggers only 30% on Kindle blog subscriptions is a fairly standard example of their thievery.) But if I had a teenager whom I wanted to read more, I would buy that teenager a Kindle or a Sony Reader or any other suitable e-book and offer a generous monthly book allowance that the kid could use to purchase whatever caught her fancy. Do the words "the quality of mercy is not strained" mean anything different to those reading this essay on their iPhones? Of course not.

This isn't a zero sum game, and I would have thought that these otherwise subtle writers would understand that. The acceptance of the inevitability of the electronic book does not herald the death of the book we all grew up with.

There will always be people who prefer the emotional attachment of owning actual books, or people who want to read in the bath, or people who like leaving paperbacks behind in airplane seat-back pockets. On the other hand - having moved ten times in as many years - I can't pretend I haven't at least fantasized about a single box, into which I chuck my Kindle and go.

Of course, I'll still love my library, love sitting amid my shelves, poking randomly through titles I haven't considered in years. But the destiny of the book lies not in satisfying Luddites, curmudgeons and romantics, but rather in introducing a new generation of readers into the joys of literature and making sure that those words we spend all those years in lonely rooms writing will find as many readers as humanly - or digitally - possible.

Mark Sarvas is the author of the novel "Harry, Revised," just released in paperback - but sadly, not yet on the Kindle.

Comments

[kabel100]

Mark - I couldn't agree more with this post. What will be, will be and it's our love of the word and intellectual thought that goes on.

[rjmiller]

Apparently the best solution is to give your ebooks away for free. Look at what its done for Cory Doctorow, or how it boosted sales for Neil Gaiman last year.

[3reddogs]

Think about it. Haven't you ever thoroughly enjoyed a book and given it to someone else to read who then passed it on to somebody else, and on and on and on? I suppose authors should be happy about e-readers like Kindle because everyone will be forced to buy their own copies of a book or maybe they're unhappy because they think the end result will be less people reading books. The thought of that makes me unhappy too.

[oregonbird]

More people reading, and less trees being sacrificed. It's eco-friendly. Publishers need to think new technology; newspapers should be printed on demand, and recycle on-site for another printer. And why not arrange up-load on-site? Instead of going on-line, put it out to the sellers, and sell on-street an up-to-the-minute e-paper?

Yep, I DID watch rocket-ship movies when I was a kid. But all that could have happened, if the newspapers had acted when the trend away from paper became clear. Nearly ten years ago.

Now publishers are at the same place. Do or die. Use the new tech, because that's where everyone is going, with or without them. Sell me an e-book -- by giving me lots of information about what is available. Because right now, I'm starved for information on new books.

[SpectraLFire]

Now where ever I go I have my book shelf on my back. Except its all packed in nicely in my kindle. I love literature. I can’t write to save my life but I love to read others words. Love my Kindle.

[oregonbird]

There are books you dog-ear, and constantly refer back to, read as emotional comfort food. There are childhood books that depend upon turning the page and having the dog's tail sticking out from under the fence. But then there are the other books. Beach books. Candy books. Buy, read, discard books, which are different for everyone. For me, it's true crime, historical fantasy, most biographies, and various flavors of "lemme tell ya what's really goin' on" from modern experts on political/ economic/ religious matters. Oh yeah baby, Kindle me.

Because I've only got three rooms and seven bookcases, and I'm not getting rid of my Heyers, Heinleins, Poes, Elllisons, Chalkers, Butchers, Woolfes, Pratchetts, Whites or LeGuins

But I'd love to put Charlaine Harris on my Kindle, and have her everywhere. Same for Dorothy Parker, Thorne Smith, Poppy Z. Brite, John D. MacDonald and Dashiell Hammett. I can definitely put something like the Kindle to use. Just NOT the Kindle. What an annoying product -- it reminds me of something the Soviets would put into space -- it works, it's just clumsy and uninspired.

Not to mention, there isn't a high-school or college student who should be without one. Or, at least, something that works like one, only A LOT BETTER.

[Carolita Johnson]

I love my Kindle! I've been waiting for it ever since I saw a mysterious tablet that turned out to be a book on The Martian Chronicles, on TV when I was a kid. I've been reading books on my Palm, and on my cell phone since ebooks appeared.

So, what does that make me? Someone who doesn't like books? Duh!
The electronic reader is the future of literature and literature-lovers!