Read any good ebooks lately?

People have been talking about ebooks for a long time. Even ten years ago, you’d have had a difficult time finding anyone who
believed that ebooks weren’t going to revolutionize the worlds of reading, writing and publishing. But guess what? Ebooks haven’t  happened. Not yet. Not really. Because a lot of us love books. Like me, for instance. I just have never been able to picture myself snuggling up in front of a fire with a mug of tea in one hand and an electronic device in the other.

But recently, I held a Kindle. (This is not such a big deal in a lot of countries, but it is here in Canada, where, as I write this, the Kindle is not yet available.) And I have to say I was captivated by it. Maybe it was partly the thrill of the ‘forbidden’—once Kindles are hanging on a rack beside the checkout at the neighbourhood Walmart, they won’t be nearly as interesting. But I felt…power. All the novels I could store on it! Every book Dickens, Chandler & Atwood ever wrote! And I could take them all
with me wherever I went!

The scene of this Kindle-fest was a publishing “unconference”, Bookcamp Vancouver. Besides the guy who’d picked up the Kindle on a recent trip to the U.S. and was now kindly allowing a group of attendees to pass it around, was a guy letting people fondle his Sony Reader. Sony Readers are available here in Canada; at the moment, they’re selling for $259 plus tax. I’m not going to buy one. Not yet, anyway. If I could buy an electronic reader of some kind for fifty bucks? I dunno, I was thinking as I handed the Kindle back. I still like to turn real pages.

I teach a course in critical reading at University of Victoria, Division of Continuing Studies. I use the first chapter of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, by Kate Atkinson, as one of the texts to examine, and in my last class a student drew our attention to Atkinson’s appropriation of the opening of Tristram Shandy. I knew this but had become fuzzy on the details—the first and last time I read Shandy was in the 1970s—so I went home and did some research. Google and Amazon led me to 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, by Jane Smiley, in which Smiley discusses exactly what I was looking for.

Here’s the thing: I own 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. The book sits on a shelf in my office. I could reach that book without getting out of my chair. But I didn’t. Reach for the “real” book, that is. Because Amazon’s look-inside-the-book feature together with a search term took me right to the page I wanted and that was easier than leafing through the paper pages an arm’s length away.

And I had one of those “moments”. I realized that I’d crossed some sort of threshold, and that, for me, the revolution is coming.

(As it turns out, Atkinson nudge-wink acknowledges her debt to Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, with a reference to “the Reverend Sterne’s quill” on page two of Museum. Of course. How did I forget that?)