Anthony Grafton: Kindled
The airplane rises from the runway. Bent, folded, and spindled into the last seat in coach class--the one that doesn’t really recline--I pull my Kindle out of the seat pocket in front of me, slide the little switch, and lose myself in Matthew Crawford’s story of his passage from policy wonk to motorcycle mechanic. The gritty world of his workshop takes shape as I read. The airplane noise fades away, the pain in my cramped knees almost disappears, my eyes cease to blink. I am Kindled. It is by no means the first time. These days, in fact, I spend a lot of my time that way.
For the last few months, my Kindle has come with me pretty much everywhere: on research trips to Cambridge, London, Munich; to weekend conferences; even to lectures and movies, for the moments before they start. (So many books, so little time.) The one in my possession is the second-generation Kindle, not the big new DX that my hip colleagues have begun to pull out at meetings, their PDFs neatly readable on its 9.7” screen. But it is a neat little device--light, slender, as easy to hold for a long time as a small paperback--and it works very well. The battery charges quickly, which is more than I can sometimes say about myself, and then works for an astonishingly long time. Amazon’s Kindle Shop, made accessible by Sprint, is only a click or two away, and downloading books and periodicals from it is quick and simple. And everything you need to do to move forwards and backwards through the texts, mark them up and store them, immediately becomes apparent. The device seems to arrive borne on clouds of ease and simplicity. When I took it to Britain, a single search on Google turned up a converter that enabled me to recharge it as easily in my dorm room at Trinity College Cambridge as at home.
The Kindle liberates you. Once you have it, you don’t have to ransack the Fiction and Literature sections at airport bookshops, pulse fluttering and breath becoming shorter, as you face the prospect of an eight-hour flight with nothing but a laptop full of work to do (we addicts have a hard time with withdrawal). You don’t have to break your back schlepping six books in case you run out of reading matter during a sleepless night in your hotel. You can even get the Homeland Security people to crack a smile and engage in conversation--at least if you carry your Kindle, as I do, inside a special book hollowed out for the purpose, and produce it when you undergo your screening. Any road warrior with a taste for reading will find the Kindle indispensable....
What does the move from codex to Kindle mean? Will electronic reading kill the long, demanding novel and the deep, complex work of scholarship? Or--an even scarier thought--will it foster the vogue for vooks? (Vooks are hybrid works that combine text with video. They are to real books what PowerPoint presentations are to real lectures.) In search of help in thinking about the future that readers confront I turned, first, to a recent essay by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. An expert on Hegel, Schelling, and Heidegger, an interlocutor of Bataille, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Derrida, Nancy is not the horror-inspiring hater of the humanities that those names will evoke in all too many readers. He loves books in the good old way, in all their gritty materiality: “the engraved and impressed characters now repeated in numerous copies on mobile supports, like those that preceded them, traced with a stylus and copied numerous times on skin, bark, or silk.” But in the end, Nancy argues, books cannot be reduced to stable, material things. Born thanks to an author’s feverish creative energy, texts shift endlessly in form and meaning as publishers and booksellers, critics and readers, respond to them....
The Kindle is terrific for downtime reading. I have enjoyed reading several new books that I would never have bought at full price or put on my material bookshelves, but that were easy to find and whiled away an hour or two. I am even more pleased to know that the complete Sherlock Holmes and several Dickens novels, which cost pennies, are always available (as they are, of course, on laptops and iPhones). The bigger version offers a good way to bring all your papers, once scanned and turned into PDFs, to meetings. But it is not a great way to read demanding or technical books.
An experiment at Princeton and other universities, in which some courses have put all of their readings on Kindle, has yet to arouse much enthusiasm on my campus. “I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,” said one student who is taking part, as quoted in the Daily Princetonian. “It’s clunky, slow, and a real pain to operate.” He explained that “Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes, and other marks representing the importance of certain passages--not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs. All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.” There are readers--Adobe has an excellent one--that allow really efficient markup and search, but they are expensive, and they have to be used on a normal laptop or one of the increasingly popular miniature laptops known as netbooks. And by the unchanging laws of human nature, if twenty students in a class have their computers open, ten of them will be looking at the assignment--and the other ten will be checking their mail, messaging, Tweeting, surfing the Web, or playing Minesweeper. The Kindle does not offer these distractions, but for students and teachers working intensively together on a set text, it works far less well, so far, than books....