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It makes me cringe when The New Yorker stumbles, even if the accident happens on one of its blog divisions and not within an actual issue. Maybe I’m hero-worshipping too much, but I like to think the writers and editors there hold themselves, and their readers, to a more stringent standard of reasoning, which means: no stupid statements in print, and no us-vs-them journalism.

This anti-Kindle blog post from earlier today commits both sins:

“Am I supposed to understand the desire of the Kindle to be held and read? Or the humans who prefer them to books? When I read a book all the way through to the end, I want the evidence stuffed and mounted on my bookshelf. My suspicion is that people who prefer e-readers use them primarily to read Harlan Coben, and are happy to be able to delete the physical evidence.”

I’d say the post is about 80% tongue-in-cheek, and after that opening the writer goes on to discuss the current spate of popular technology books. But the underlying tone–which is against not just the Kindle but the entire concept of ebooks–remains as reactionary and closed-minded as any screed you could find in newspapers, magazines and websites all over the U.S. from 2008 to 2010. Jeez, even David Pogue, who is pretty much a stand-in for the mainstream when it comes to consumer technology, has stopped trashing them!

And although I shouldn’t have to, just to be clear I want state that I see no problem with buying print editions instead of, or even in addition to, digital editions. That “you’re either with me or against me” mentality is so damned dispiriting when you’re a book-loving geek.

“What Kindle Wants” [The New Yorker]

(Photo: IrishFireside)

Via Chris Walters’ BookSprung blog

7 COMMENTS

  1. All I can say to people like him is ‘must be nice to be able to afford a house big enough to store all that.’ For urban warriors like me in expensive cities where even one-bedroom apartments cost as much as a house where my sister is, it’s ebooks or NO books….

  2. I don’t really begrudge how the author of that article reads. I’m not sure why he would begrudge how I read. Unless we found one day that all Kindle editions were magically abridged, and we’d been reading less than we thought, otherwise, I believe it’s the same book. 🙂

  3. Maybe eBook readers do read popular genre fiction, not the stuffy literary works he wants to put on his bookshelf as mounted trophies. I don’t know this is the case, but it’s certainly plausible. To me, the idea of reading something so you can display its dead carcass is either silly or sick, depending, I guess, on whether I’m in a cheerful mood (let’s go with silly).

    If the message is that eBook reading is about reading and paper reading is about trophies, I’ll stick with reading and eBooks, thank you.

    Rob Preece
    Publisher

  4. The thought that ten million plus eReaders don’t read content up to his standard is a good definition of snobbery. I just checked. I have 200+ books on my Kindle and less than 10 are in my Fiction collection. And all of them were purchased by someone else in the family (we share an account). I think I read a fiction book 2 years ago.

  5. The NYT isn’t a news organization to respect when it comes to publishing journalism.

    Most the the publishing trade press rolls their collective eyes whenever the NYT covers publishing or gives opinions on what is happening because they are always wrong or totally clueless.

    This is yet another example.

  6. @Marilynn — The article appears in The New Yorker, not in The New York Times. Two completely different and independent publications that are not related even at the corporate level.

    @Robb — I can only relate my own experience, but I tend to read only fiction on my Sony, and then fiction that I read once and then delete. Much of my reading overall is nonfiction and for nonfiction books, I always buy the p version because I want them added to my permanent library. (There are a few exceptions in that there are a few fiction and nonfiction books that I have bought both the p and e versions of where the e version is on my Sony, but the p version gets added to my permanent library and the e version gets deleted after reading.) I don’t see ebooks in their current incarnation as being “permanent”; I do see my nonfiction purchases as being worthy of handing down to grandchildren. Very few of the fiction titles I buy are worthy of remembering after being read, let alone keeping for posterity.

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