Libraries and Ebooks

Jesus and baby feeling the love on the new iPad Universal wi-fi.

Prior to Barnes and Noble and Borders, people got their books from the library—buying books was for students and lonely housewives (pre Fabio). Then along came Starbucks and iTunes, and sitting at a crusty counter drinking mere coffee in an oft-used cup was no longer de rigueur, and buying CDs seemed exorbitant and cluttered. Amazon then introduced the Kindle and Ebooks, and everybody jumped in line, culminating with iBooks and the iPad.

The library was once where Lady Dowdy or Dude Lanky provided instant and very useful information, or at least walked you over to the 40 pound Tomb of Enlightenment—which wasn’t to move more than five feet from its resting place. There you would sit for an hour, diligently poring through the book, transferring its wisdom onto note cards. Google has replaced the old lady and lanky dude, and the hour has been reduced to five minutes of strategic cut and paste.

Research on the Internet is vastly superior to old-fashioned research. Instead of isolating oneself in a fifth floor room full of like-bound reference books, we sit in our home office (if so appointed) trying to avoid phone distraction, the fiendish proximity of the Web, your attention-starved puppy, your answer-hungry girlfriend, or your neighbor/landlord who needs help hanging a mirror.

But books: solid, hand-held, bound books made with real paper—should they be allowed to die? (Would you want to read the bible via Ebook?)

I recently experimented with the Kindle app for the iPhone. It is simultaneously awesome and painfully silly. On a screen smaller than your palm, you can read about three sentences—flip—three sentences—flip. It’s definitely not a replacement, and I’m not going to get in to the iPad/Kindle argument, because both are phenomenal for what they’re designed for. However, taking a tablet reader to the beach is slightly more harrowing than taking a simple paperback. You can’t just set your Kindle on your towel, take a quick dip, then come back slathered in salt water and pick up your Kindle while your puppy drops a spit-filled tennis ball right on the screen.

I heartily support the transition of information, books and newspapers toward complete digitization with one major reservation: it isn’t lasting.

Competition in the book world consists of font choice, text size and the cover image, but

Fabio, with a face full of bird in 1999.

regardless of what book you’re judging, that book, with obvious exceptions for environmental variations, will be there to read 100 years from now. The digital world is all about proprietary enlightenment, and it all suffers from planned obsolescence. My first laptop took a big squat. My second computer got slow to the point of absurdity.

I backed up my files to “floppy discs.” These discs I threw away after transferring to an external hard drive. My point is the first writings were on cave walls, then slabs of stone, parchment, books … the Internet? Hundreds, even thousands of years from now, will the Internet be as tangible a historical resource as those early slabs of stone? As lasting, however prone to damage, as a classic book?

Will anybody care?

The Library of Congress has already committed the reams of shorthand digital [diarrhea] that is Twitter to its records. Perhaps future anthropologists will find nothing more than some cryptic Twitter blurbs—the modern equivalent of caveman shorthand?