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| Hearsay: |
Stephen Marche on how the e-reader is the next step because it makes your book a “transbook”, ie, a book to contain all books.
My paper library consists of 2,000 volumes, making it both much too big and much too small. I consider a working library to have about 5,000 volumes, but a mere 2,000 has been sufficient to be one of the most continuous problems of my life. Moving it around is a nightmare. A hundred boxes of books is a terrible burden in the 21st century. Yet I know that I will never get rid of them. I’m too attached now. Just as the ancients respected the scroll more after the development of the book, just as the hand-written manuscript became sacred after the invention of print, the printed book is now beginning to glow with its own obsolescence.
But I am immensely excited for the new phase of the book. So far the new technology has been called the “e-reader,” a term obviously picked by engineers, not poets. In literary terms it’s a transbook, by which I mean that it is the book which can contain all books. Why are so many writers so afraid of this staggeringly wonderful possibility? A book is a singular object that can contain many voices, but the transbook has the potential to be a singular object containing all voices. It is not just another kind of media; it is the dream of ultimate text.
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October 20th, 2009 at 9:52 am
“On Monday, the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally.” Err, not in Canada, you say? Pity!
October 20th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Until he drops his ebook in the tub and then find out, well, no, his backup hasn’t worked and he’s been cut off the server account for some reason.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
That the book wants to be a transbook (whatever…) is about as clear an argument as liking the feel of paper.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
“Kindle 2 isn’t really about what we may or may not want as readers and writers. It’s about what the book wants to be”. Really? I wasn’t aware that books were sentient.
October 21st, 2009 at 3:25 am
Time and technology march on and I can see the day when the e-book or transbook will be replaced by the implanted chip that allows you to download whole libraries of information straight into your brain.
What will we call that? I don’t really mind, as long as my work is included and I get paid for it!
Chris Warren
Author and Freelance Writer
Randolph’s Challenge Book One – The Pendulum Swings
October 21st, 2009 at 2:13 pm
“Kindle 2 isn’t really about what we may or may not want as readers and writers. It’s about what the book wants to be”. – or what Amazon wants the book to be.