Romance of reading, e-book style
BY JOHN M GREEN. E-books! Why should buying e-books stop us loving and buying print books? We download movies, yet still enjoy the cinema. So, to channel Mark Twain, the incessant stream of reports that the print book is dead may be greatly exaggerated.
The big pluses of e-books are get-’em-now and get-’em-cheap. Remember back in the 1970s and 1980s when whizz-bang digital wristwatches were all the rage, getting so cheap they devastated the traditional Swiss watch industry, until consumers twigged they didn’t buy a watch merely to tell the time.
A watch was also a fashion item, a symbol of status and style, and consumers started paying for them again.
Will our ballooning love affair with e-books eventually burst, like it did with e-watches? I don’t know, but it’s worth noting that, like “real” watches, print books offer status and even some convenience benefits over their digital counterparts.
The Kafka, Proust or Eat, Pray, Love in your hands instantly tells the other passengers on your bus, train or aircraft how wise or trendy you are. But if you’re reading an e-book, they’ll suspect it’s porn!
Imagine people entering our homes to find bare shelves and empty coffee tables; no books silently revealing our taste. How do we hide that door to our panic rooms without a bookshelf wall?
How do we press that flower or love letter between an e-book’s pages? Do a print book’s batteries die? On aircraft, we can read print books from the moment we strap in right until the arrivals gate, yet they ban e-readers during take-off and landing, taking big chunks out of a domestic flight.
Many e-books use fonts that are lifeless and dull, lacking the care publishers take to design a book so it’s more than simply words on a page – a visual as well as a mental delight.
How do my favourite authors sign my copies of their e-books? When we love a book, we lend it repeatedly, yet, with e-books, that’s a pleasure of the past.
When we hate a book so much we want to throw it at the wall, if it’s an e-book we risk breaking the device. Reading print books in a bath or pool is a fairly riskless luxury. Sure, a splash might crinkle paper pages, but it might zap your e-reader dead. We own print books, but license e-books, so if the e-bookseller goes bust, will my e-library vanish?
Of course, there’s more to e-books than their low cost and high convenience. Reading an e-Ken Follett won’t break your wrist. Turning e-pages in bed is so quiet our partner no longer demands we stop our noisy reading. Our bedside tables no longer groan with the guilt of what we haven’t yet read.
Flying overseas with e-books saves our creaking backs. It also leaves space in our bags when we impetuously buy that new fedora.
My verdict? Buy new books in both formats, and flip between them depending on the situation. Happy reading!
John M Green is an author and businessman. Writing has been a lifelong passion, from editing his school newspaper and later joining the board of publisher UNSW Press. Post-university, his writing ambitions paused while he became a partner in two major law firms and then, until 2006, an executive director at Macquarie Bank. In 2008 he teamed up with his daughter, Alison Green, to establish Pantera Press, which has been short-listed for Small Publisher of the Year 2013. John’s debut novel, Nowhere Man, was published in 2010, followed by Born to Run (2011) and The Trusted earlier this year. The federal government recently appointed John to the Governing Council of the National Library of Australia. He will be a guest at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival one-day event on September 1.
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