So, having studied English literature and creative writing for about nine years I always get three questions, which to me are all equally aggravating—“So, do you want to teach high school?” “Yeah, but how do you teach creative writing?” “How do you feel about the Kindle?” The two first question are for another day, what I really want to focus on is the latter of this heinous trifecta—the eReader. I will not beat around the bush, I personally find the eReader appalling, maybe even borderline terrifying. Bookstores are disappearing from our landscape. Earlier this year we watched Borders file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and close 226 stores nationwide. This means, in most towns, there are now no bookstores. Nada. A big fat zero. That is distressing. If you have a book store left in your town, go stand in and mull around. Touch a few books and wander the isles. Feel a true bound spine under your fingertips. Turn a crisp, white page of print. Take in the fragrance of coffee wafting over the dictionaries, poetry collections, and memoirs. Cherish this moment because soon it will all disappear. You can gaze around and say, “Pretty soon this will all be a Kindle.”
How does that make you feel? If you are real blood-pumping, flesh-bearing being with a soul you might be crying a little. If not, you are clearly beyond the point of no return and have become some sort of cyborg that can’t wait for the V-chip to be implanted in your wrist to make life easier, because apparently anything not involving a button is just too complex. Bookstores and libraries are slowly fading away into Yesteryear, something we will tell our children about—these rare artifacts once called books.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines an artifact (artefact) as “anything made by human art and workmanship; an artificial product.” This sense of the word can be seen from the word itself: it is derived from the Latin words arte, ablative of ars (art), and factum, the past participle of facere (to make). The book is defiantly on the decline a source of recreation and information and fading into the realm of artifact. To generalize, we as a culture have shied away from concepts like “workmanship” because patience is, moreover, hardly required for day-to-day living. Everything is instant, convenient, and obtainable. Why drive to a bookstore, record shop, theater, playhouse, park, etc. when I can hit a button and have instant amusement and luxury in front of my eyes? If I don’t have the cash at hand I can just charge it with invisible currency and worry about payments later. Gone are the days of saving, waiting, and feeling the happiness of reward for striving towards a desire. There stands a great degree of artisan-like quality, patience, and workmanship inherent in a book. The line of antiquity from bookmaking hails from materials like, clay, stone, tree bark, papyrus, wood, parchment, scrolls, and so forth. Materials that first had to be harvested from the earth by human hands and molded into a workable, pliable substance before being inscribed with familial stories, prophecies, biblical verses, myths and epic journeys. Think of the humongous history of printmakers and revolution—the toppling of monarchies, the challenging of ideologies, grassroots underground mischief that changed many a country—because don’t forget knowledge is power. Books are dangerous, they make people think, they make people question, and, more importantly, they make people question their current situations and conditions. Why were minorities and women kept from reading for centuries? Well, because it is easier to keep the ignorant subjugated. If you don’t know, then you are easier to control. And how easy would it be to gain control if eReaders were the only source of literature that could essentially be taken away at any given moment?
So, soon we all have an eReader of some kind except for the few eccentric weirdoes that hole up in their home libraries huffing ink, reciting Dante, hording the that last few pages of papyrus like it’s the only pack of cigarettes on the cell block when some conspirator blasts the bookweb with government toppling design. Suddenly, that “book” disappears or your reader can’t download it or your reader won’t work for week. When you log on next week your whole Nook has been revamped with a whole new suggestion list, all your previous downloads gone, and pretty soon you are “told” what to read by the limited (*cough*approved) selection of electronic literature before you. The weirdoes in their home libraries become the new revolutionary leaders and we turn to them to initiate change, fight for freedom, and give us back the task of printmaking and book distribution as means of warfare. People gather and build up the community that we lost with the overwhelming amount of technological devices that kept us apart. The fear of people gathering has always been that mobs and riots start, and the scary part to those is power is that the bumpkins are gathering because they finally figured it out. I mean, it could very well happen. He who controls knowledge has the power. Fahrenheit 451, anybody? Are we our own culprits because we as a culture support the eReader? Are we setting ourselves up for our own downfall? You know, just keep that mind.
This of course is my hyperbolized rant, somewhat meant in jest and somewhat acutely nesting in the back of my mind.
But seriously, to tone it down a notch there are a great many things lost in the decline of the book. You lose a sense of community. Book sharing, that passing down of one great read to another, private inscriptions, jotted down insights you find picking up a used book in which you somehow commune with voices of the past are dying—and sadly, something that future may not know. I used to spend hours in a bookstore to pick out the gift of a book. I would pour over pages, titles, covers, blurbs in order to find something personal and suited just for the tastes of the giftee in question. Now, you just throw a Kindle gift card in their face and shoot them a “Happy Birthday” via Facebook. I mean, I can hardly say anymore, “Oh that story sounds amazing, you will have to let me barrow that when you’re done,” because who is going to let you barrow their whole freakin’ Kindle.
You lose an architecture. I have four (and growing) large bookshelves that make up the architecture of my home—and, in sense, make up the architecture of my life. Each book represents a person, a moment, a transition, a memory for good or bad. I read Almost Transparent Blue (Ryu Murakami) on the plane to Paris, On the Road (Jack Kerouac) still has sand in it from the beach, I was reading the poetry of Maxine Kumin when I received the most disquieting news that changed my life up to this point. If you value your books, they more than likely hold a sturdy place in your house. My books make up my home, literally and metaphorically speaking. If I were to lose my books I would lose my hearth, the foundation of so many memories.
If I drop my copy of Pride and Prejudice in the tub as I chillax to some candlelight and Sade I don’t lose my whole library. Enough said.
I don’t ever have to worry about the battery life running out in the middle of my hard copy of Dharma Bums nor will my entire library ever get a virus.
Lastly, but not finally, as a writer myself, and perhaps more pertinent to poets, you lose control of the page. Poets will spend hours, often a lifetime, arranging their words and meticulously crafting the way the poem looks on the page just as meticulously as the choice of the words themselves. The construction of a line break may be as thought out and planned as an aerial invasion. Few people have influence over the change of a line break—other revered poets, mentors, and editors—and from time to time those people are told to go to hell, the line break stays. Our current poet laureate, Billy Collins, put it quite exactly like this:
"... that's what we do, we make lines. Charles Olson, the poet, said no line must sleep, every line in a poem should be wakeful to the lines around it. And when you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet's decision, it becomes the device's decision."
Very few artistes of any genre are not one to give up artistic control to another human being let alone a device. In these respects I encourage the continuation of printed books and promote a steady consciousness to what the growing support of electronic texts will have on our culture. There is so much to lose in the face of advancing technologies and we forget a little bit more of our human aspects everyday. The convenience of the eReader is just a little too alluring, a little too seductive for me to jump head first into the world of literary gadgetry. Nothing compares to the solid back of book in my hand. Reading a book requires every crook of our senses: we hear the flurry of pages, we see the compiling of ink to form characters and landscapes, we touch the leather binding of ancient craft, we smell the musk of used bookstore’s shelves or the crisp freshness of the unread page, and we taste...well if you are tasting your books you must be out of Zig-Zags and, in that case, I hope you are using the endpaper. No doubt, reading an actual book is a sensuous experience, one that virtual texts cannot provide. So, I guess at the end of day you really have to ask yourself is how synthetic do you want your world to be? If you favor the eReader, I suppose I will see your sniveling face again during the revolution as you come bawling back for me to save you. And if you hold an old tried and true text in your hand I will see you at the next meeting, same place, same time, same dank basement.
