Collected Miscellany

Hearing that the Amazon Kindle had been compared to an eight-track player Alan Kaufman decided he needed a real attention grabber analogy if he was to gather the eyeballs necessary to get Huntington Post readers to click away from pictures of the latest porn actress claiming to be Tiger Wood’s mistress.

Not content for hyperbole he went straight for ridiculous and offensive. That’s right, Kaufman decided to use the Holocaust to make his point:

When I hear the term Kindle I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.

I believe my reaction is best expressed in the language of teenager texters everywhere: WTF?

Is Kaufman really insinuating that e-readers are akin to racial genocide? Even for the Huntington Post this is absurd (but its lack of logic is par for the course I am afraid).

Kaufman tendentiously connects Nazi policies with new technology and the process of putting books into digital form and decides that a literary holocaust is upon us.

The hi-tech campaign to relocate books to Google and replace books with Kindles is, in its essence, a deportation of the literary culture to a kind of easily monitored concentration camp of ideas, where every examination of a text leaves behind a trail, a record, so that curiosity is also tinged with a sense of disquieting fear that some day someone in authority will know that one had read a particular book or essay. This death of intellectual privacy was also a dream of the Nazis. And when I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.

But his argument is made up of nothing more than his own lack of shame in using the Holocaust to comment on the Kindle and some stream of consciousness paragraphs about the history of the Holocaust, Nazi attitudes about technology and books and a tacked on conclusion that links this all to the Kindle.

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I have just begun to catch up with some blog posts on The Amazon Kindle, Sherman Alexie, and the future of publishing.

I haven’t followed the kerfuffle in detail, but it started with this:

At a panel of authors speaking mainly to independent booksellers, Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” said he refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. He called the expensive reading devices “elitist” and declared that when he saw a woman sitting on the plane with a Kindle on his flight to New York, “I wanted to hit her.”

Ed Champion decided to get a better handle on exactly what Alexie meant and actual got a much more nuanced response.

Now, as a Kindle owner I am not offended by the term “elitist” because I am actually in favor of elitism when properly understood and because I understand that this is an expensive gadget. But I did find the claims interesting.  So I followed some links and tried to get a handle on the arguments.

Since I don’t work in publishing, and I am not an author, I am not going to speak to the larger issues of digital rights or the impact of e-books on writers income, etc. Instead, allow me a little rant from the consumer’s perspective.

First off, let me just say that I find this reaction very puzzling:

Why do you consider the Kindle “elitist?”

I consider the Kindle elitist because it’s too expensive. I also consider it elitist because, right now, one company is making all the rules. I am also worried about Jeff Bezos’ comments about wanting to change the way we read books. That’s rather imperial. Having grown up poor, I’m also highly aware that there’s always a massive technology gap between rich and poor kids. I haven’t yet heard what Amazon plans to do about this potential technology gap. And that’s a vital question considering that Bezos wants to change the way we read books. How does he plan to change the way that poor kids read books? How does he plan to make sure that poor kids have access to the technology? Poor kids all over the country don’t have access to current textbooks, so will they have access to Kindle?

For the sake of argument let’s grant him the price issue.  The only reason I own a Kindle is because it was a gift.  I get the it’s too expensive part.

But the rest of it seems bizarre to me.  Is Jeff Bezos required to figure out the socio-economic, political, and cultural ramifications of the Kindle?  The guy is trying to sell things.  And are you not allowed to build and sell technology unless you have a plan to insure poor kids have access to it?  This whole thing strikes me a caricature of politically correct thinking.  The Amazon Kindle is a threat to poor kids reading habits!!!! What?

This reads to me like a complex argument built to prop up an emotional reaction.  He likes old fashioned books – the Kindle and Amazon seems like a threat to that so he digs his feet in and says “No!”

Alexie seems unable to comprehend that the vast majority of people don’t think this way.  People don’t think about sweeping issue of how technology impacts society.  People think about what helps them or gives them joy.

I read a lot of books. I read books for pleasure, books for work, and books for personal growth.  I read magazines and newspapers too.  The Kindle makes reading more convenient because:

- I can carry a wide variety of books and magazines in one small lightweight device.

- My subscriptions follow me electronically and don’t pile up at home.

- If I need something to read I can get it instantly.

- I can make notes and add highlights (and now access those on the web).

Why is it hard for people to see this?  If you are heavy reader who travels very much at all the Kindle is a lifesaver.

I ride the bus, or take my scooter, to the office to work.  Only having to grab the Kindle is great.  It not only saves the pain in my shoulder that would be involved in carry all of this, and saves me the trouble of having to remember which books to grab, but I can even listen to some nice background music instead of the chatter and noise around me.

And what I find so hilarious is that Alexie’s complaints are elitism dressed up as egalitarianism.  Do you think poor kids give a crap about the socio-economic, political or cultural impact of e-books?  Of course, not.  Sure, maybe they struggle with wanting the latest gadget but not being able to afford it.  And those avid readers often wish they could afford to buy books instead of having to get them at the library, etc.

But the kind of issues Alexie raises are only thought about by those who are politically engaged and have the leisure time to contemplate the impact of consumer products on culture.  It is the same type of attitude that wants to shut down Wal-Mart because they would never consider shopping there. For certain people everything has a political angle and that has to be addressed.

And here is the thing.  I may disagree with some of the politics or cultural concerns and I may agree with some of them.  And, obviously, I think people have every right to voice their opinions and take action based on those opinions. Hate the Kindle?  Don’t buy one.  Want to try and convince others to do the same? Fine by me.

And if you work in the industry, or are impacted by it, I completely understand why you would voice concerns and take actions that you think are in the long term interest of your career and industry, etc.

But don’t expect everyone to think politics/culture/industry first.  Some of us just like reading books and any technology that makes that easier or improves the process is going to be popular.

And any strategy that doesn’t take this fact into consideration is doomed to failure in my opinion.

I know Amazon isn’t real popular right about now (if it was ever popular with the literary crowd) and the story I am about to comment on is old.  But I wanted to comment on it at the time and never managed to do so.  I think it is worth noting in case you missed it.

In his commentary on the Tournament of Books championship, John Warner echoed my sentiments toward publishing and eBooks perfectly in saying “Let a thousand flowers bloom—only free market, rather than commie-style.”

But he also offered a powerful example of the attractiveness of the Kindle:

The digital/print divide was reinforced for me this weekend after reading the New York Times Sunday Book Review online. The lead review was of Wells Tower’s new short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. It’s a rave and reinforced many of the great things I’ve been reading elsewhere, as well as my own impressions of Mr. Tower’s writing, having read his fiction in McSweeney’s and his nonfiction in Harper’s. It has become, officially, a “book I want.”

In the same edition there is a review of another new collection of stories, Caitlin Macy’s Spoiled. Another positive review, though the description doesn’t make the book sound as immediately appealing to me specifically as Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Still, it became, officially, a “book I’d like to check out.”

This was Saturday, early, maybe eight o’clock. It was raining, unseasonably cool. I’d finished digesting the paper and was working on my oatmeal and I figured I’d see what’s what with these two new story collections. With the weather and the early hour, I wasn’t going to go anywhere, so I turned to the wife’s Kindle and found that only Macy’s book has a Kindle edition. I’d downloaded the first story in seconds, finished it in 15 minutes, and ordered the rest of the book right then and there. Meanwhile, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned remains in my unbought, “books I want” category, potentially forever since I’m constantly coming across books I want. Wells Tower and his publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux would’ve had a sale. Now, who knows? It may just get buried under the avalanche of new books.

That story illustrates one critical aspect of what makes the Kindle so useful and attractive (and dangerous quite frankly).  If you have a sudden desire to read a book, as John Madden might say: “Boom!” you can be reading it is seconds.

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I hope this means more books available for Kindle and available on the publication date.  I seem to have looked at a few books who were not available on the Kindle until after the hardback had been released.  Might have something to do with the publisher’s profit on each item.

I would love to see digital offerings increase in both numbers and the type and size of publishers.