E-Readers, Ten Years On

I need to make a correction, and it is about ten years overdue, and the statute of limitations on bookseller pronouncements has, I’ve decided, finally run out. Here is what I used to say, from behind the counter, with the full authority of the trade: the e-reader is a fad, the book is irreplaceable, and no serious reader will settle for a screen. I said it warmly, I said it often, and I said it while — this is the confession — a Kindle sat charging in my own kitchen. I now own two. It is time to account for what I got wrong, and also for the smaller thing I got right, because I did get one thing right.

What I got wrong first: the fad theory. The e-reader was not a fad; it was a fork. The trade braced for replacement — the record store scenario, the photo-lab scenario — and replacement simply never came. Print did not die; print barely flinched, and by some measures the physical book has had its best decade in memory while e-readers settled into a durable parallel existence. Both formats survived because — this took me years to see — they were never actually competing for the same job. That was everyone’s category error, mine in mirror image: the panicked publishers thought the devices did the same job as books, and I thought that too, which is why I thought no serious reader would want one. The serious readers were ahead of both of us. They had figured out it was a different instrument.

A different instrument: that is the entire correction, and I want to dwell on it, because it dissolved a decade of my snobbery in about a month once I finally understood it. A piano and a guitar both make music; nobody asks which one is the real instrument. The paper book is an instrument optimized for presence — spatial memory (you remember arguments by where they lived on the page, and the page’s thickness in your left hand is a progress bar your body reads without being asked), marginability, shelf-life in the literal sense: the book as furniture of the mind’s outer room. The e-reader is an instrument optimized for access — a thousand books at the weight of one, type that resizes, a library that follows you through hospital waiting rooms and airport delays and the insomniac hours when you cannot turn on the lamp because someone is asleep beside you. Presence and access are both real goods. They are not the same good. Owning both instruments is not a compromise; it is a competence.

And the access side turned out to hold the moral trump card, which was played on me in this site’s own comment section, by a reader named Priya, and I want to enter it into the permanent record here. I had written, in an early draft of my old opinions, some familiar riff on the sanctity of paper. She wrote, in effect: adjustable type gave me back long novels. Low vision had been steadily evicting her from print — the paperback’s font shrinking year by year like a room going dark — and the despised device turned the lights back on. “It was never a betrayal of paper,” she wrote. “It was a door.” I have thought about that sentence for a year. Every format debate I have ever conducted was conducted from inside the assumption that the deluxe experience — good paper, fixed type, lamplight — was available to everyone and merely being declined by the lazy. It is not available to everyone. For millions of readers the e-reader is not a convenience but a ramp into the building, and a bookseller sneering at ramps is not defending literature. She is defending her own unexamined luck.

Now the thing I got right, because the correction is not a surrender. I claimed, back then, that something happens between a reader and a paper book that the screen does not replicate, and ten years of dual citizenship have confirmed it — for me; the caveat is now permanent. My e-read books are thinner in memory. I finish them, enjoy them, and they pass through me leaving less sediment; ask me where in the book a scene happened and I have nothing, no left-hand thickness, no geography. The research on screen reading and retention remains genuinely contested, so I make the claim only at the width of my own skull: paper embeds, for me, and the screen streams. Which is why the fork settled, in this house, into an honest division of labor — the disposable and the enormous and the middle-of-the-night to the device; the loved, the difficult, the to-be-marked to paper, where my pencil lives.

Ten years on, then, the accounting: wrong about the fad, wrong about the readers, wrong — most instructively — about what counts as seriousness. The serious reader is not the one holding the correct object. She is the one who has arranged her instruments around her actual life: its eyes, its hours, its wrists, its insomnia. Sometimes that arrangement is a first edition in an armchair. Sometimes it is 14-point type in a dark bedroom, three books past midnight. The counter I said my foolish things across is gone now anyway. Consider this its last transaction: one opinion, well-worn, returned at last. Store credit only. I hear the customer is always right.