eBook Blog: The Social Element

"Oh! You're reading Emma! I envy you..." Air Canada flight attendant, Toronto to Calgary flight.

"Oh! You're reading Cold Mountain! I bet you LOVE it. You don't? How could you not? Edward, did you hear that, she HATES Cold Mountain. I have no idea how she can hate it either" Fellow passenger on a seemingly endless Charlotte to San Francisco flight

"Moby Dick? What the hell's wrong with you? Did you fail highschool or something? Want to read a real book, take my John Grisham." Fellow passenger on a mercifully short Chicago to Detroit flight.

"Moby Dick? It's so much better the second time around isn't it?" Flight attendant coming to my rescue on the mercifully short Chicago to Detroit flight

Having spent much of March in waiting rooms and offices, I was glad to have Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. At almost 700 pages, it offered a near continuous reading experience. I was aware, however, that often my reading choice was perused and evaluated by just about everyone I encountered. At times, I was naively hopeful that I'd run into someone during these many, many hours who would say "I love Mrs. Gaskell!" and we could have a long discussion about the book. On occasion, I must confess, I also thought "I'm tired, I don't feel well, please don't ask me about my book."

Although it never happened with Mrs. Gaskell, the presence of a book is often a conversation starter. I've had some fascinating conversations with people about what I or they were reading-- conversations I never would have had if one of us hadn't seen the book cover and said "How are you liking that?" The social element of books was never so apparent as when, last spring, Moby Dick and I travelled extensively on planes and trains together (here he is in the Seattle airport). More than any other book I've read in public, Moby solicited a morbid curiosity among the people I encountered. I couldn't read it anywhere without someone commenting on it (or, wincing sympathetically).

When someone mentioned the book, we initially started talking about Moby Dick (it's amazing, by the way, how many people feel guilt from never finishing the book in highschool or college)but then we'd move onto other books, or I'd tell them about how I was reading it as part of a pact with a friend who I was making read Jane Austen, or how this same friend had promised me that if I started reading Moby Dick on March 1, by the time I was done, it would be the Tigers' Opening Day (and correct he was). After we talked about Moby Dick, we would often talk about other things. An architect asked me about eBooks and I asked him about architecture in North Carolina. Eventually, he would give me superb restaurant suggestions for Seattle and I told him about places I liked in Chicago. I talked about baseball with an accountant and about micro-breweries all because of Moby Dick. Granted, I also had to listen to why I should be reading John Grisham with a drunk rowmate because of Moby Dick but, on the whole, it was an amazing experience. As was, I should say, re-reading Moby Dick.

Last week I was sitting in a waiting room with my eBook reader. It was the first time I had brought it out in public. As I was holding it, I was thinking about all of the people I've had random conversations with over the years because of the visibility of my or their reading material. As I read my Walter Pater, people seemed curious about the eBook reader itself but, logically, not about what I was reading because they could not see it. I began to wonder if the days of random conversations about reading and books are over. Or will they just be different? Maybe it's nice to have one's reading choices hidden? Maybe not.

I also started to think my friendship with He With Whom I had the Austen/ Melville Pact. An amazing friendship began in part because he perused the bookshelves in my office and we discovered we had a lot of common reading interests (oddly, it was Melville who started it all). We've always known that the physicality of books has a rich and complex social element but now that books are starting to lose some of that visibility, I think we're starting to understand those social components a little more. Just as one wouldn't necessarily offer one's iPod to a stranger for perusal, I can't imagine casually sharing the contents of my eBook reader with a new acquaintance. Ebooks, I realize, are different than print books. Yet, at their core, they're still novels or monographs or narratives and we'll always have conversations about the kinds of things that draw us to books regardless of their form. Maybe we'll have the same conversations but we'll just approach them differently. It's something I'll continue to think about (along with the whiteness of the whale, of course).