eBook Blog: The Day Before Day One

The day before I picked up my Sony eBook Reader, I was at home; I’d been ill and was recovering at home. I’d spent much of the day reading and enjoying Adam Gopnik’s book Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. It was the first sunny day in a few weeks and I was grateful for a great book. At one point I paused, held the book in my hands and thought about the book as an object: I loved the aesthetics of the cover; I loved the scent of the new paper; I loved the velvety feel of the cover. I loved thinking about the day I bought it: a cold, grey day in February in Toronto when my friend John and I basked in the warmth and comfort of Nicholas Hoare books on Front Street. It was the kind of day and place that makes you want to put everything aside and read for weeks on end. I realized holding that volume that I love books for all sorts of emotional, aesthetic, social, and tactile reasons. I was, in short, perhaps not the kind of reader one might expect to buy an eBook reader. Indeed, I was surprised to find a number of my friends who see books in the same way that I do viewing my impending eBook purchase as a kind of mutiny against paper: “we’ve lost another one,” they seemed to lament. I am also, however, a curious reader and an academic librarian researching digital humanities: to ignore the whole eBook/ Kindle phenomenon was impossible.

Still, on the day before I would go out and purchase my eBook reader, I looked out the window at the burgeoning spring and held the Gopnik book in my hands a little longer than I might normally. I thought about the pleasures of my recent book shopping with John, about the way my husband and I swap books by the stack, about the conversations I have with the staff of my local branch of our public library when I go to pick up my books, about the feel of new (and old) paper and wondered— nervously, I’ll admit— about whether I’d fall in love with my eBook reader so much that I'd never go back to the printed book. Will it change me as a reader? Will it change how I see, read, think about books? Will it change what I read? These are questions in which I'm personally interested and professionally invested and I can't imagine they'll have easy answers.

As a way of thinking through these issues, I'll be posting some desultory thoughts about the eBook Reader question. This is the first in a series of blogs about my new eBook reader and the experience of getting used to it. I'm working on a formal project related to eBooks and literary history and am thinking through through a lot of these issues on a range of fronts. My informal thoughts will be posted here to the Cafe. A number of blog posts are written, although Ludditely, (if I may invent a word) only in a handwritten state. I'll type them up soon. Stay tuned...