So, as I said in the previous blog entry, the Kindle and similar products, being digital, infect the texts they contain with contingency. A work on a Kindle can never pretend to be perfect or permanent. But maybe I can get over this and maybe, as my editor Ben Adams says, the coming generations simply won’t see it in this way. After all, in the past, slates were wiped clean, vellum was abraded, manuscripts overwritten and, of course, books were burnt. I could therefore be dead wrong. The electronic book might be longer lasting than bronze, as Horace (writing on parchment, copied on to vellum) put it.
So I’ll move on to my second objection, which has to do with the effect of electronic publishing on our mode of reading. I mentioned that the Kindle enabled me to acquire a book immediately in a remote location, and that this was very useful. The Kindle and the iPad and other similar products provide instantaneous service and immediate satisfaction. The question is, do books do the same? That is to say, what is the effect of a book being delivered instantaneously without any effort on the part of the customer? My fear is that if book is delivered with gratifying immediacy but fails to deliver immediate gratification, the reader may feel cheated or, at the very least, vaguely dissatisfied and, most of all, impatient with the book, which is inferior to his Kindle (Or her Kindle. Or his/her iPad or her/his Sony reader etc: I am picturing an overweight red-faced man, and he has a Kindle sticking out of his outsized jacket pocket, so I’m sticking with the masculine pronoun, even though I know women read more).
Some books are written not to deliver immediate gratification. Some are written deliberately to be hard, slow and awkward. Sometimes books are slow and awkward because the writers had mismanaged some of the mechanics of plot and character, but then blossom to become masterful works. Most of all, however, a book is a medium that demands a large investment of time and effort, which is what the Whispernet and Apple promise to do away with. A book is not necessarily seeking efficiency, but the system of electronic delivery is. To my mind, there is a fundamental mismatch here. Patience is a virtue that reading requires and often rewards.
Apple and Amazon fetishize consumer experience and make impatience a virtue. But the boor in the line who can’t wait to get his food is also likely to be the same guy who complains most loudly that he doesn’t like what he got. And even if we are not boorish consumers, the magic of the “Whispernet” and the Apple store make us want to try again, to go back for more so we can experience their magic again. The result is we gobble down the words, tripping and skimming through the text without paying proper attention. This, indeed, is one of the aspects of Goodreads that bothers me. It seems to encourage a form of speedreading, and a sort of bidding contest among participants. Why tell the world you read 5, 50 or 500 books? Just enjoy the books.

Books take longer to absorb. They are slow food for the mind but are increasingly being delivered by massive fast-food merchants. Apple and Amazon are for the mind what McDonald’s is for the body. They also have a similar homogenizing and debasing effect on appetite. Always to eat in McDonald’s while abroad rather than test local foods is the mark of a coward and an ignoramus, of a man (yeah, the same fat guy above) who is fearful of novelty, scared to ask for things he does not know and unaware that his chosen diet is both bland and noxious. To travel in the world of culture with a Kindle or, worse still, an iPad, strikes me as being similarly misguided.
Or do I exaggerate? Obviously, I feel that I am sweet reason itself on this question. But I will admit to getting a little heated at the fact that we are destroying our planet by burning coal to power the servers that allow people to play with virtual cows and sheep on Facebook, or sling fat birds around on their iPads, no matter how fun this may be. But that is definitely the subject for a different blog entry.