Light My Fire

Like thousands of other Americans, I got a Kindle for Christmas. For those of you who don’t pay much attention to gadgets, a Kindle is an “e-reader,” or an electronic device on which one may read books or other published products that were heretofore the province of paper and ink.

There are a number of such devices on the market, including one from Sony, one from bookseller Barnes & Noble and the new Apple “iPad,” but Kindle is by far the most popular. It is sold and supported by Amazon, to which it is connected wirelessly without requiring a computer. To download a book, the user simply clicks a link to Amazon, selects a title from several hundred thousand choices, and hits “purchase.” Within a couple of minutes, page one of the book is queued up on the Kindle screen.

The price of most bestsellers and other recent fiction and nonfiction is usually around $10, while older titles are often cheaper. Books in the public domain, which would of course include what we refer to as “the classics,” are generally available for free.

Having become aware of that fact, and knowing that Santa was going to bring me a Kindle, I decided to conduct an experiment. About a week before Christmas I looked through my bookcases and found a 19th century novel I had never read, a paperback edition of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. (I did see the 1967 film version when I was 14, but my only memory of it was the crush I had on Julie Christie.)

I read about half the book before I opened my gift and charged it up. Later that morning I read the brief instruction sheet and was able to acquire Hardy’s novel without any difficulty, although it did take some time to find my place. Over the following week I read the second half of the story, which deals with love and longing among Victorian-era sheep farmers, on my new e-reader.

The Kindle is the size of an average paperback (5-1/4 x 8 inches) and about as thick as a pencil, with a screen size of 3-1/2 x 5 inches. Most people attach a custom-fit leather cover, which gives the user the sense that he is always reading a right-hand page. The screen is not backlit like a computer, so you still need ambient light to read the black type against a gray background.

So which medium provides the better reading experience? I wish I could give you an unequivocal answer, but like most things it depends on what is important to you. The printed text had better contrast, and I found that my eyes tired a little sooner with the e-reader. Both are easy to carry and store, but of course you can toss a printed book across the room or sit on it without fear of consequences, should you feel the need to do those things.

You can also write in the margins of a conventional book, but the Kindle does allow you to make electronic annotations. I don’t care about that function myself, but I do care that I can’t lend a Kindle book to a friend (unless I lend him the Kindle along with it). Barnes & Noble’s device, the “Nook,” does allow some degree of sharing among users, and I suspect that Amazon may be forced to revisit that issue.

Some of you may be wondering by now why I’m giving you so much information about e-readers, as though I were writing a column for Popular Mechanics. Well, I’ll tell you why.

It’s important. I probably don’t need to explain to you why it would be important to a person such as myself who works in publishing, but I think it’s important to everybody, and especially to everybody involved with education. Let me give you two examples of how these devices could impact our lives.

My wife teaches English literature in high school, which is a subject that is near to my heart. I once asked her why high school students are forced to study Moby Dick, which is way too difficult for them, when Melville wrote several novels which would be far more accessible. It only serves to ruin a great book and possibly turn them off to an entire genre.

She told me that there are two criteria that determine which books are taught in America’s schools. One is literary merit and the other is availability of a given title in classroom quantities. You can’t teach what you don’t have. When e-readers become as commonplace as iPods, and they will, all the great works of fiction will be available to everyone at no additional charge.

After high school, the stakes get even higher. There is no more critical issue to America’s future than the cost of higher education, and those of you with kids in college know that a big piece of that expense is textbooks (my wife and I recently ponied up $800 for a single semester). The high pricetag on textbooks is not caused by hefty royalties to authors, or even by obscene profits for publishers.

Compared to the mass market, textbooks are printed in extremely small quantities. The shorter the run, the higher the unit cost, especially in large, hardcover books on high quality paper. The cost of downloading such a text onto a Kindle, on the other hand, is virtually nil. Authors and publishers could still get their due while students could realize huge savings, plus the added convenience of carrying all their books in their pocket.

Like other electronic devices, e-readers will continue to get better and cheaper. Within the next year there will be models with full-color screens and two-page spreads, all for less than the current Kindle price of $279. Newspapers are considering the possibility of providing subscribers with large-format devices on which their morning edition would magically appear each day.

When I announced at a staff meeting here that I was getting a Kindle, one of our salespeople called me a traitor, the implication being that I was abandoning print. I’m not, abandoning print that is, because I believe that magazines will be very popular on paper for a long time to come, but that is really beside the point.

I’m a publisher, not a printer. The basics of what I do, providing content to readers and an advertising platform for vendors, are the same regardless of the technology employed to do so. I would suggest that the same principle applies to you.

I don’t know exactly how e-readers will affect your business, but I do think they will have an effect. It is worth noting that the two largest purveyors of e-readers, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, are neither publishers nor electronics manufacturers, but retailers.

Hardy’s novel, by the way, was well worth reading. I came away from it with a renewed appreciation of how dramatically technology changes, while human nature remains constant.