Regular readers of this blog know my adoption of e-reading is underway, but at a cautious pace. ( iEvolve? Will e-readers end bookshelves?) My last post – Will Fat Books Sell More E-Books? – was about whether or not doorstop books would be enough to make me take the e-reader plunge. Well, yes and no. No, I did not put an e-reader on my Christmas wishlist. On the other hand, seriously researching electronic reading devices has made me realize that I’m going to “cross over” soon. I’m guessing 2012 will be the year. That’s assuming I find a reader that offers the features I want at a good price. What do I want my e-reader to do?

• Brighten my day. I like the lack of glare from grayscale e-ink technology but I also want the option of colour – I’ll be reading newspapers, not just books, and who wants to absorb all the things going on in the world these days in black and white?
• Show me what it means. I want a dictionary and I want it at my fingertips. I was seriously considering the Kobo Vox, which has great colour, but unfortunately no dictionary. (What were these designers thinking?)
• Tell me how to say it. It’s not enough to know a lot of big words – what’s erudition without proper pronunciation? My smartphone and computer offer a speaker icon so I can find out how a word is pronounced (and thereby not embarrass myself when I repeat said word at a dinner party) and I want the same feature on my e-reader.
• Don’t try to force me to love only you. I dislike proprietary formats. Why should I buy books only from your bookstore?
• Gain a little girth — without adding any weight. While each e-reader I looked at was light enough to hold for several chapters without straining my arm, they just weren’t…big enough. I want something that more closely mimics the feel of a book in the hand. (I know – tablets are bigger. I did linger at the iPad table, and I almost went for a PlayBook.)  I tried flipping one e-reader sideways, expecting the text to go horizontal as it does on my smart phone, but it didn’t work.
  

Am I too fussy? My husband thinks so. But I’m betting that by my birthday, there’ll be a couple new e-readers on the market that will satisfy me.

Meanwhile, in my research I discovered a few good sites with information on e-readers. I recommend Good e-Reader. If you want to let me know what I missed in my research, please comment below.

(Photo credit: goXunuReviews)

In my family, the pleasures of Christmas have always had more to do with good food and drink and thoughtful conversation than with gifts. But we do give each other presents and by far most of these (since mp3s pushed CDs off the list) have fallen into the literary category. I make my husband’s life easier by giving him a list of books I’m interested in and letting him choose a couple. This year, I’m interested in Stephen King’s 11/22/63. At least, I was until I went to the bookstore and checked it out.

It wasn’t a bad reaction to his writing – I always read the first page or two to help me decide whether or not to buy and these did not disappoint – but the size of the thing. It’s a doorstop of a novel, weighing in at 2.9 pounds. (That’s 1.3 Kg in Canada, where I read.) I hoisted a copy off the display table and held it up with both hands: Did I really want to go to bed with this baby? Was it going to feel comfortable on my lap? Shouldn’t it come with some sort of padding?

Another book I’m interested in is Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. (A big year for Steve books, no matter how you spell it.) This one is 2.2 pounds, an improvement, but not by much.

So far, I haven’t officially added either of these books to my wishlist. I’m thinking about them. But now I’m also wondering if this should be the year I break down and get an e-reader. (It took me weeks to decide on a smartphone; it would take me at least this long to do iPad/Kobo/Kindle comparisons. On the plus side, by then we’ll be into January sales.) Meanwhile, I’ve decided to browse the bookstore for some “lighter” fare. There’s no reason I can’t wait until my local bookstore has 11/22/63 and Jobs in paperback for me to try it out. Or until it has a sale on e-readers.

For more on the subject, check out Deccan Chronicle’s Future of fat books.

Packing for a flight to northern B.C. recently, I dithered over which books to put in the limited space of my carry-on luggage. I would need a few; it’s a seven-hour ferry ride from Prince Rupert to Haida Gwaii. Someone pointed out that what I needed was an e-reader. Hadn’t even thought of that but, of course, that would’ve solved everything. It was too late to go out and buy one but on the plane, I began to wonder if the time had come for me to get over my loyalty to books made of paper. Then, in a cluttered living room of a B&B in Masset, I realized a side to the e-readers vs real books debate I hadn’t considered before.

Copper Beech Guest House, owned by poet and novelist Susan Musgrave, had a window overlooking the harbor and either side of this view, shelves stuffed with novels, memoirs and chapbooks of poetry. The coffee table was piled with books about photography and painting and history. When a small group of us gathered for breakfast in the morning, I was grateful to have these books within arm’s reach. I don’t like to talk to people, especially not strangers, until I’ve had my first cup of coffee, and browsing through a cookbook not only stoked my appetite for the eggs frying in the kitchen – it also provided a way to avoid small talk.

Over a second coffee (I was more sociable now) I told my fellow lodgers about my book-packing problems. We discussed the pros and cons of e-readers and agreed they were undoubtedly convenient. On the other hand, wasn’t it true that part of the draw of travel was to “get away,” and one of the things we liked to get away from was time spent facing electronic screens?

Not only that, rooms like the one we were in wouldn’t have the same ambience if there were only an e-reader or two on otherwise bare shelves. Sure, a guest would be able to hold in one hand all the volumes in this house – but she would then miss the weight of a book on her lap, the feel of its pages and the realization that other travelers from around the world had turned those same pages before her.

I’ll be trying out e-reading soon, I know, and I’ll probably become a fan of its convenience. But when I arrange a stay at bed-and-breakfast in a distant town, I’ll be looking for a place with comfy chairs and shelves loaded with the kind of books that have real spines.

Oh, the books I packed: A classic, Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, a mystery, The Lincoln Lawyer, by Michael Connelly – and Fodor’s New York City, because on the ferry ride home, I wanted to do a little research for our next trip. No decision yet on what kind of reading I’ll pack.

On Tuesday, two mornings before its month-long, complimentary weekly delivery campaign was due to end, the Globe and Mail called to ask if I’d be willing to upgrade my current Friday-Saturday subscription to the full week. I was torn. On Wednesday, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad. Today, Thursday, I wonder if one day—sooner than later—this iPad will be the solution to my angst.

Okay, lukewarm angst. I don’t (yet) feel especially guilty for receiving my weekend paper in hard copy. I like holding that newspaper in my hands. Yes, it’s the product of dead trees. But does it really matter, if I recycle? My more environmentally-aware friends will tell me yes, I’m sure. But I don’t feel bad about my “paper paper.” I really don’t.

Let’s leave aside, for a moment, the issue of dead trees. Let’s talk about dead newspapers. I care about newspapers. While I think blogs are great (obviously, or I wouldn’t have started my own), they’re not newspapers. “Citizen journalism” may be journalism—no doubt undergrads in communications programs still debate this—but 99 percent of the time, they’re just opinions with links to news organizations. It’s organizations like the Globe that can do in-depth series on the emergence of China or the issues of mental health.

But, my tree-hugging friends say, you can support the newspapers you like by paying for their digital content. True. The Globe doesn’t charge for this yet but who knows how long this will last? The New York Times is now demanding money for its digital version.

Speaking of dead or dying things, consider the age of the majority of hard-copy readers. According to an article I recently read (in the kind of magazine with pages you have to turn) it’s people of my generation—I’m a boomer—and older who are the major consumers of print newspapers. The generations below us are happier getting their news online. Once we’re gone—in fact, likely long before we’re gone—paper papers will be old news, so to speak.

I’m not dead yet, and I’m not going to stop getting that bundle of newsprint delivered to my front door anytime soon. But earlier today, when the Globe called back for my final decision, I declined the Monday-Thursday addition to my subscription. I didn’t have time to read half the pages in them and throwing that unread half into the recycling bin just felt plain wrong.

And I have to admit that this morning, as I was reading all about the iPad in my last free issue of a Thursday Globe, I kept imagining what it would be like to be reading the same content on an electronic device…it might work…it’s possible I could learn to like it better…iEvolve?

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?)