I am the proud owner of a NuvoMedia Rocket eBook, a device about the size of a box of Cracker Jacks. The most popular of the new hand-held electronic readers, it stands in a cradle on my desk as an outrider of The Future that has the publishing business buzzing. It weighs less than two pounds. It is sleek and well-designed; I can store 10 books at a time on it.
And some day, I might even read one of them.
E-publishing, everyone in the industry agrees, is on the verge of transforming the business of books. But no one knows what version of the future to steer toward.
Will readers really surrender their intimate bond with the printed page? If you eliminate all the costs of paper, binding, shipping and warehousing by selling most books electronically, what will the pricing model be, and will there be any place in it for traditional publishers?
And, most interestingly: If writers don't need the hallowed name of Random House or Simon & Schuster to get their books to the market, who will mediate between writer and reader, pointing you toward the 80,000 words written by the next Saul Bellow and away from the 80,000 words posted by a guy who gets CIA directives through his fillings?
Former Random House editorial director Jason Epstein wrestled some of these questions to the ground in a generous April essay in the New York Review of Books, which managed both to reminisce sweetly about the good old days when you could find W. H. Auden shuffling about the office in his carpet slippers, and also embrace the uncertain future.
Good books are fantastically quirky enterprises, he writes, best nurtured by those who care deeply; ideally, they are sold by word of mouth. They are, in sum, the perfect product for the Internet, and the rest will take care of itself: The critical faculty that selects meaning from chaos is part of our instinctual equipment.
Human beings have a genius for finding their way, making orderly markets, distinguishing quality and assigning value. This faculty can be taken for granted.
After reading his essay I too felt optimistic. Imagine a world in which no book ever goes out of print. Imagine 1,000 small communities of passionate readers swapping notes and nurturing talent. Imagine that I could winnow down the groaning shelves of books that fill up our basement, without my husband bleating, "But what if I need that some day?"
But the human genius that selects meaning from chaos is not the fastest runner out of the block. As a consumer, I've found that the current market in e-books is the same old crass marketplace, only with fewer books.
Publishers have grudgingly started licensing some of their bestsellers in e-formats, so you can get four current titles by Stephen King (though none of his earlier back-list) and all of Mary Higgins Clark, and "Monica's Story" and "JonBenet: Inside the Murder Investigation." But in the e-books section of barnesandnoble.com, which is the chief retailer for current titles in the Rocket eBook format, there are exactly 12 books listed in the category of fiction. If you turn instead to "classics," you will find 59 titles--compared with 161 in the category of "business."
You can try a site that offers free classics, from the public domain. But even here, once you've waded through Rocket-Library's cumbersome search function, the choices seem thin and almost accidental. You can find enough Honore de Balzac to last you a lifetime--stories that even he forgot he wrote--but you can only find one novel by E. M. Forster.
When I got my eBook, last Christmas, I plodded through all this apparatus, as well as the machine's somewhat complicated installation process (you have to download the titles into your PC, and from there to the eBook), and enthusiastically stashed an odd collection of titles that I could plausibly tell myself I wanted to read. Some time.
I never have read Booth Tarkington, and here was "Penrod" for the asking. Maybe this was just the goad I needed to plunge into "The Education of Henry Adams."
I have not read any of these books since then, of course, because I chose them in a spirit of obedience: I had this machine, and now I must read on it.
It felt like a pale relative of the mystery--the mix of impulse and curiosity and association--that lures any of us to a book shelf.
