A recent New York Times piece on this year’s BEA stirred up some controversy when it included a Sherman Alexie quote on the Kindle. Needless to say, the man’s not a fan:
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.”
There’s a good response to this over at Booksquare. Alexie subsequently qualified his statements in a followup interview with Edward Champion. The whole interview is definitely solid, touching on issues of class, technology, and control; it’s one part in particular, though, that I wanted to address here.
Have you ever used a Kindle? What has been your experience?
I’ve played with a Kindle. Didn’t emotionally connect with it like I immediately did with my iPod. That’s been the fascinating thing for me. I’m not even remotely a Luddite. I love all of my tech toys (and I love Amazon.com), but I have a visceral negative reaction to eBooks. I recognize that it is partly irrational and that’s why it was easy to be influenced by some of the powerful letters of dissent I read from Kindle lovers.
It’s that visceral reaction that I can absolutely relate to. (For me, it corresponds with pieces that take an “oh well, Kindles will replace books” attitude, whether tongue-in-cheek or not. One example of this can be seen here. I’m half-tempted to collect them.)
I tend to think that this reaction correlates directly to readers of literary fiction. Consider: the MP3 player can be looked at as, essentially, a much more efficient take on the same principles that the Walkman and Discman had. The MP3 player holds more music than either, doesn’t accidentally eat your media, and doesn’t skip when you walk. There are all sorts of additional bells & whistles to it, but at the core, there’s a pretty clear evolution at work there.
The argument for e-readers is that, essentially, they’re lighter and more efficient than carrying around books. With respect to literary fiction, though, trends seem to go in the opposite direction, once you move past the hardcover. A few years ago, at my parents’ house, I saw a copy of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping on a bookshelf. I hadn’t yet read it, and so I borrowed the copy in question. This was, in fact, a mass-market paperback from the early 1980s, and there are plenty of other mass-market paperbacks of literary authors to be found on those same shelves — authors whose work likely now can only be found in the larger, heavier, less efficient trade paperback format. (And if that last sentence isn’t a giveaway, I should point out that the bulk of my collection is, in fact, in that same format.)
Which — and I realize I’m likely not the first to argue this — helps explain why I share Alexie’s “visceral negative reaction”. There are a large number of us who have made a choice for quality of presentation over overall efficiency of format, and the relatively dismissive takes that some in the press have made of that choice is enough to prompt any number of angry words and provocations.
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