Loves her Sony Reader, but only for manuscript reading, not e-books: Our adrenaline pumper of the week

By David Rothman

The adrenaline pumper of the week is a paradox among some editorial folks at New York publishers.

Why do certain members of the corporate literati love E Ink readers for displaying manuscripts, but would hate reading actual books off them?

Just what’s going on beyond blind worship of p-books as physical objects? I, too, appreciate The Look and Feel. But I also like being able to carry around an entire e-library in my pocket and enjoy books and authors I otherwise might not even know about.

Isn’t there a place for both P and E? In the end, as colorful and witty as a cover might be, or as satisfying might be the feel of the pages, shouldn’t words count more than paper and cardboard? To be of another mind is to be a paper fetishist, as some proud PFs call themselves. I admit that certain books will display better on paper—do small screens really do justice to Faulknerian sentences? But then the same could be said of embryonic books, aka manuscripts.

E vs. 22 Xeroxed copies

The good news is that increasing numbers of paper fetishists in publishing have reached the point where they can appreciate E Ink-based readers as work tools.

In the Not want decaf! blog—logo shown above—a hardworking editor of children’s books tells how much she hated lugging around paper manuscripts on the subway or doing the Xerox routine to make 22 copies. “You eventually become adapt at removing multiple paper jams and feel like you spend more time with the copier than with your spouse.”

“The overall process is a lot faster, cleaner, and cheaper!” says Julie or whatever her real name is. “In fact, our IT department found that every copy that we make of a 400-page manuscript costs the company roughly $7! The cost seems even more ridiculous when you realize that most of those manuscripts won’t even be read all of the way through (most editors give a book 30-50 pages to hook them).”

The party pooper

But then Julie spoils the fun by confessing that if she “didn’t work in publishing,” she “wouldn’t buy one for personal use. For me, the interesting thing about e-readers is that unlike music or film, books have never needed a device in order for people to enjoy them. I think that is the main reason that nothing has taken off in books like VHS/DVD players did for movies and the iPod has for music, and I don’t think that most book lovers would like the majority of their library to consist of e-books rather than physical copies. I do think that e-readers might be a good idea for people who don’t typically read often or those who travel frequently and run out of reading material because they can’t carry the books along with them (although airport bookstores now have a service where you can ‘rent’ a book at one airport and ‘return’ it at another airport at any time and get most of your money back!). I think part of what book lovers love about books is owning a physical copy to share with friends or display on their shelves, to look at the cover and hold the book in their hands and flip through the well-worn pages if it is a much-loved copy.

“Along with the rest of the publishing industry, I’ll be watching with interest to see how the e-book market changes and grows over the next few years. It’s great to see publishers experimenting with e-books by offering excerpts or entire books for free download, and I think there are a lot of interesting ideas for the future of the industry, such as including a free e-book when you buy a physical copy of the book. I think e-books can only be a good thing for the publishing industry and have the potential to reach more readers than ever, and in my office it helps us spend less time at the copier and more time actually reading. Given the choice between a stack of paper or an e-reader I’d choose the e-reader every day, but I don’t think my bookshelves will start dwindling anytime soon.”

The lessons here?

So what are the lessons here? First, the mention of 22 copies is another reminder of all the bureaucracy that bogs down Big Publishing—and food for thought, when executives within multibillion-dollar conglomerates talk about putting out books without paying advances to writers, with needs of E being mentioned as one of the justifications. I’m all in favor of such experiments in certain cases. But along the way, if publishers truly want to adapt to the Long Tail model, do they really need twenty-something-member acquisitions committees, a pretty efficient way of filtering out many quirky titles that could be hits within niches? Or maybe even Moby Dick? Did Maxwell Perkins—too late for Herman Melville but not F. Scott Fitzgerald—operate that way?

Second, we once again see how out of touch certain publishing people are with the new market. No, not everyone will want to need “a device,” but millions are already carrying gizmos that could evolve into first-rate e-readers—cellphones; they’re only going to get better and better for digital reading, as rollout displays and other technologies improve. And what’s this about e-books not being for frequent readers? Aren’t those people the very one who might want to reduce costs and—at least if they live in apartments, as so many New Yorkers do—to save space? Just where does Julie live, if she’s a true creature of New York City? In a 15-room penthouse?

Third, while I love E, I don’t think Julie is entirely wrong about such drawbacks as the shortcomings of e-books as social objects. But there are ways around this—for example, mention of books in blogs or Facebook lists, or, in the future, perhaps virtual bookshelves displayed as wallpaper on big-screen televisions. Meanwhile, Julie, I confess. Most of my library now consists of e-books, thanks to the miracle of public domain books, and I wouldn’t it any other way.

Detail: Party-pooper photo: CC licensed from Sleepy Sparrow. Xerox machine photo and Perkins shot are via Wikipedia.