Books are still books

Many Saipan residents have learned to pack lightly in life. A large number of humble dwellings lack the space to warehouse lots of personal stuff. Seafarers and tropical adventurers (those who remain) are happier living out of a seabag than “swallowing the anchor” and getting bogged down with too many weighty things. And jet-setting professionals have long ago learned to digitize everything and anything.

So for various reasons, ranging from space constraints to traveling convenience, we’ve distilled our archives, documents, files, letters, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, financial records, music, movies, and photo albums into the weightless realm of digital content.

But there is one glaring holdout: books.

So when somebody recently put an electronic book (OK, a book “reader,” called the Sony Reader) into my hands I was mighty receptive to the concept. All I got was a brief hands-on session with it, but since I figure these aren’t exactly common, you may not have used one, so I should offer you my initial impressions of the thing. So what you’re getting here is cursory impression, not detailed study.

Question: Can the electronic book do for reading what the iPod did for listening?

Answer: Not from what I saw.

The Sony Reader (roughly $270 in street price) is a bit bigger in profile than a typical paperback book, though it’s thinner, and it feels solid and good in the hands. It’s well-built, as you’d expect from a Sony. The text on the monochrome screen was very readable, and had none of the glare you’d associate with computers or other electronic displays.

And that’s the good news: You can, indeed, read stuff on this device. But I’d like an electronic book that acts something like, well, a book, and this thing didn’t.

For example, when I open a paperback book, I expect to see two pages of print, with roughly 35 to 43 lines of text per page. By contrast, the Sony Reader has just one screen (which is analogous to one page), so it’s lost half the game already. Furthermore, it seemed to have only about 25 lines of text; perhaps that can be changed, I didn’t get lesson in the thing, but my initial impression was that one eye-full of the Sony Reader was giving me only about 30 percent of the amount of viewable text I’d get with a conventional book. So I was constantly having to “turn” the page, and there was a distinctly noticeable lag as the new page loaded. Reading an entire book like that would be like eating a bowl of rice one grain at a time.

Meanwhile, much of the face of the thing isn’t even screen, but is buttons and bezel.

So much for the hardware end of things. As for software, issues of content, Digital Rights Management, and so on loom big, daunting, and far from solved in the e-book world. But that’s a topic for a different day.

I know that a lot of gadget enthusiasts enjoy the Sony Reader and similar products such as the Amazon Kindle. They are reading devices, sure, but to my mind they don’t really act like books. Just as a car is a car and a motorcycle is a motorcycle, things can have roughly similar purposes but entirely different essences (like, wow, dude, that’s just so Existential).

So I’m waiting for some genius to re-discover the hinge, thus creating a two-screen, fold-open device that has a more bookish feel and displays bookish amounts of text per view. This genius will also put the buttons on the edge of the device, so that the screened surfaces are unencumbered with anything but text. Then, software constraints aside, we’ll have a real e-book on our hands.

Until that happy day comes, I think that even the most fleet-footed among us will be keeping a foot in the weightiest medium of the analog age. For all its liberating magic, technology hasn’t yet turned the page on Mr. Guttenberg.

Sure, take your iPod to Micro Beach, but if you want to read something, you’ll probably be taking a book. Just like your grandfather did.