Et alia

Recently I had a moment of weakness in my stand against electronic book readers and ordered a Barnes & Noble Nook when the price dropped. I paid $149 for the new Wi-Fi version, a damn sight cheaper than the original price of the Nook, Amazon’s Kindle, and the Apple iPad. My opinion of these machines has changed.

The thing arrived the other day, and I’ve been playing around with it obsessively. Over the holiday weekend I was able to download a bunch of American classic literature for free at the Barnes & Noble site, a great way to familiarize myself with the Nook’s features and quirks. It does have a number of each.

First of all, the experience of reading on this little pad is quite different from reading a book. The screen is only 4” x 5”, smaller than the print width of the average hardback. Even smaller than a mass market paperback. Depending on the font size you choose, the text can look more like a newspaper column than a book page. I imagine this is something I’ll get used to.

Navigating the Nook’s menu system is a little tricky too. You can return to the main menu, which appears on the backlit touchscreen at the bottom of the unit, by tapping a touch-sensitive button just above it, yet I often find myself getting yanked out of the book I’m reading when I push a back-arrow on the touchscreen, thinking it will take me to a control panel instead. This is mainly due to my learning curve, but also partly to the software that controls the Nook. It isn’t all that user friendly, but this too shall pass. Users adapt.

B&N is touting the cover flow feature -- you can show the covers of your personal library or of books you might buy -- but I find the images to be so tiny that using them to I.D. books is almost laughable. It’s true that an image you select by touching it gets a little bigger, yet the type is still mighty small. Still, it gives you an idea of what the actual book looks like, if you were to hold it in your hands. You can imagine it while reading the electronic version, if that makes you happy.

I do appreciate the built-in dictionary and the ability to highlight passages and enter notes on the text. The control panel that handles these functions, though, along with the itty bitty touchscreen keyboard, are a bit sluggish and funky, since there’s a slight delay between your touch and the cursor’s movement. Even so, these are nice features that enhance the reading experience. If you’re the type to write marginalia in your books, this lets you do it without marring a perfectly pristine copy. You can also hide or delete any comments you’ve made.

Buying ebooks via B&N is a breeze using the on-board Wi-Fi, which communicates with your home network or any AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot (or even B&N’s in-store Wi-Fi). Once you tap the “Buy” button, the book is delivered electronically and you can start reading. Searching for books to buy is another story, though. If you know the specific title or author, you’ll have no trouble, but I tried a few searches that yielded either thousands of hits or none at all. Maybe I’m too used to the web-based approach, where I can change the search criteria more quickly.

One attraction of the Nook, or any ebook reader, is access to the hundreds of thousands of texts that have been digitized by Google. They’re all free, and they include most if not all of the Western canon going back to the ancient Greeks. I have a very hard time reading Google books online, so the Nook is a valuable tool for that purpose. The only problem is that sometimes the formatting can be odd, or special characters are misunderstood. This isn’t Nook’s fault; it’s the Google text-recognition software that reads, for instance, 1806 as 180G (in John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography.) You get what you pay for, ultimately, but at least you can stock up on the classics if you’re willing to overlook the tics.

I don’t mean to be comprehensive in this little review, but despite the minor flaws I find the Nook strangely impossible to put down. Knowing that I already have fifteen or twenty books in it, I’m giddy to think that I can take a break from Lady Chatterley’s Lover and dip into Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations for a while. Or buy something new because I feel like it. (I have my eye on Mr. Peanut.) Gradually the reading experience itself will feel completely natural, and I can foresee spending a lot more money on books than I have over the last few years.

Ebooks won’t displace tangible books for a long time -- probably not till paper gets too expensive to use for all those schlocky thrillers and vampire novels -- and not everybody will come to appreciate them. But think about what a book really is: words painstakingly arranged to deliver information or art to the reader. The ebook is as capable of that as traditional ink-on-paper. We can romanticize the physical book, just like we romanticize the neighborhood book store, but both are slowly becoming obsolete the same way hand-copied books became irrelevant after Gutenberg. There was a time when people were nostalgic for the parchment scroll, after all.

Should we fight it? Or should we accept that this is a transitional age in which new technologies will actually make it easier for people to read what they want, when they want? Or simply to read more. This is good.