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E-books for Missouri pack rat?
October 29, 2005 | 8:27 am
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By David Rothman
Could e-books be a great fix for a St. Louis man with a massive book addition–the kind that got him written up in the Post-Dispatch? Excerpt:
Norma Kachigian has come to terms with her husband’s addiction. It could be worse, she tells herself. It could be alcohol. It could be drugs.
Instead, Amerik Kachigian, 72, a semi-retired Granite City lawyer, has spent his life collecting books, storing them away like a well-read squirrel preparing for winter.
“I tell people, ‘The day he dies, before I bury him, I’m going to get a Dumpster and throw them all out,’” said Norma Kachigian, 65. “They’re everywhere. They’re in my basement. They’re in my garage.”
A son says: “Some people go to Mecca, my dad goes to book fairs. That’ll be his funeral pyre. They’ll burn him on a stack of books.”
“Not if his wife has her way,” says the P-D.
“He tells me he’s hidden money in his books, so I’d better not haul them away,” said Norma Kachigian, who barely can squeeze her Lexus in the garage for all her husband’s books. “He tempts me. But I tell him, “I don’t care.’ If he goes first, he knows what’s going to happen.”
Partial Rx: Public domain classics in e-book form. What’s interesting is that Amerik Kachigian reportedly “seldom reads a book from cover to cover. He prefers to use his books as reference material or to read snippets from them at his leisure.” E-books could help, with search capabilities and unlimited “shelf space.”
Needless to say, the first e-book reader for the OpenReader format could be catnip for Amerik Kachigian or similar pack rats. It will be based on OSoft’s ThoutReader, which already boasts powerful search capabilities. Of course, it would be great if Kachigian could also read e-books through to the end. He could designate a few titles at a time to read when the mood struck him–and go back and fourth. I might just track the guy down and see if he’s receptive.
The upside of Kachigian’s addiction: We’re talking about more of a benefit than a problem. The P-D reports:
Over the years, various members of the Kachigian family have appeared on shows including “Family Feud,” “Card Sharks,” “Love Connection” and “Jeopardy.”
In 2002, Kachigian’s son, Armand, won $500,000 on “Millionaire.” He credits his father with instilling in him a love of trivia.
Well, more than a love of trivia: a love of books. And e-books in the future could be a wonderful way for Kachigian to cope with his addition–kind of a methadone: not a perfect cure, but at least something to mitigate the symptoms of the “disease.”
(Via LISNews.)
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Comments:
If only my boyfriend would get more into e-books. We have well over a thousand in our apartment, and more with every paycheck. We’ve joked about having to line every wall in our apartment with bookshelves when we move next year.
The problem is, I don’t think he’ll ever get away from physical books, at least not with anything besides academic books in our field. (He reads absolutely everything– from non-fiction to salacious crime novels to Serbian epic poetry.) As things currently stand, even the lightest and most user-friendly laptop can’t compare with the portability and ease-of-use of a physical book. And there’s just something nice about flipping pages that I wouldn’t want to give up, regardless of how many great features an e-book reader might have.
I would’ve saved myself a week of work this month if an important reference book I have were available in a ThoutReader package. I don’t even want to think about how much easier it would have been to prepare for my PhD qualifying exam if I had the major reference books as e-books. But people have certain motivations for choosing physical books over e-books that I don’t think will change with time. Even though it’s cheaper, easier, and faster to fly, people still take road trips because of certain wonderful qualities that flying can’t mimic.
Good hearing from you (directly), Quinn. Maybe with good e-paper, you’ll go to e-books even for recreational purposes. In the here and now, they’re a lot more fun on tablets and PDAs than on desktops and laptops. Remember, too, that the issue isn’t just the ergonomics of reading, but the number of actual books you can get your hands, er, eyes, on.. I’d never have caught up with a New Grub Street if it hadn’t been for e-books. Meanwhile, yes, you bet I’m looking forward to more titles getting into ThoutReader, the future OpenReader. Ah, the more to search at once!
Oh yeah, I can definitely see how smaller devices would make it more attractive. Though it does strike me that it might take at least one generation beyond my own for pleasure reading through e-books to be consistently relied upon by a majority of users. As much as my generational cohorts and I are increasingly living a “digital lifestyle”, there’s a sense at least among some people that technology is invading too many nooks and crannies of our lives, and there are some things that should be left alone. The book is one of them. We’re okay with digital encyclopedias (what would we do without Wikipedia?) but I remember using Encarta on CD as a kid, and furthermore, encyclopedias generally don’t fall under the rules of “book culture”.
There’s a certain joy in buying a book, loving it, and giving it to a friend (which doesn’t jibe so well with current licensing policies, however reasonable I think they are. That could probably be changed, though.) And there’s something beautifully human about going to a used bookstore and picking up an old, tattered copy of a book, complete with highlighting and notes scribbled in bad handwriting, and getting to know someone you’ll never meet through what parts of the book struck them as interesting. Not to mention the awe that comes from reading a 100-year-old book, with pages turning colors.
It seems to me that another thing about e-books (particularly if they’re being read on nifty-but-expensive gadgets) is that it furthers the “digital divide”. Pleasure-reading books tend to be very affordable, and if you’re really short on money, you can always resell it to a used book store. This really comes out in places like Russia, where in general you can’t take a bus or subway without seeing a very large number of people reading. Despite generally being in hardcover, books are very much within the reach of just about everyone. And the “New Russians” who would have the money to buy an expensive PDA or tablet aren’t the ones who are overly inclined towards reading. In this way, academic e-books make perfect sense (people who need to labor over reference books as part of their job usually aren’t pinching pennies) but for the low- to mid-income user, what’s the incentive to switch to e-books for pleasure reading? Even if they’re priced to be less expensive than physical books, there’s a significant up-front cost that might be overwhelming, even if it resulted in money saved over time. And unlike scholarly reference books where I think there really is a problem with the way research is carried out, I don’t see what’s “broke” about pleasure reading books, and in need of fixing. (I think it’d be really cool to have, don’t get me wrong, but I’m a techie geek, what can I say?)
There are other functions as well that physical books serve, such as a question of prestige among scholars and students. In my field, if you want to consider yourself a serious scholar/student, there’s a certain 4-volume etymological dictionary that you can’t really get in the US that you need to have on your shelf. There’s a variety of other titles as well, and displaying them on your bookshelf is a sign that you’re in the in-group. The more, and the more obscure, books you have, the more committed you look to the discipline. Then again, given a couple generations, there might be some other way of doing it (maybe a virtual library on your homepage?) but I’m not sure what would be gained by that. There’s something I like about shelves full of books that goes beyond mere luddite-ism, and trying to push e-books to something beyond a nice option strikes me as approaching the point of technology for technology’s sake.
But Quinn, what will you do about a small Carolina town where the only “bookstore” is a local Wal-Mart? And where the library is hardly of the University of Chicago variety? In fact, a very real North Carolina novelist, Thomas Wolfe, explored older but somewhat similar territory in his classic Look Homeward, Angel, where the following dialogue happens between Eugene Gant and a midwestern woman visiting little Asheville:
If you want to stick to paper books for recreational reading, that’s fine; but think about the possibilities of e-books for future Eugene Gants. What’s more, if even “average” young people can more easily find books of interest to them, what does this mean to the nonGants as well?
Finally, consider the five laws of library science:
It seems to me that for recreational and nonrecreational reading alike, e-books can help libraries live up to the precepts of S. R. Ranganathan.
As for the cost of the e-book gadgetry, I assure you–that’ll decline, plenty.
Hey, don’t get me wrong, I’m as excited about the possibilities of e-books as anyone, and there’s definitely some issues they’ll help address, I just think there’s some downsides that make it such that there’s only such a big niche they can fill.
I sympathize with the residents of a small Carolina town– hell, I spent my first 17 years in Puyallup, WA, population now 33,000+, but I remember the days before Borders when Walden Books was the best you could do. Unless you’re into Spanish, it’s slim pickings; linguistics books are just a joke. (To this day, there’s not much even at a much larger store like Borders.) As for the local library system, I was a near-permanent checker-outer of the lone book on linguistics: “Teach Yourself Linguistics.” And before the internet, you were pretty much stuck.
But there’s already a solution, which accommodates people’s level of comfort with physical books: Amazon.com. And there are many other places you can get books to suit more specialized interests; I’ve found plenty of sites to order books in Russian, to supplement the meager selection available in stores. And it’s all one Google search away. Granted, you don’t get the instant gratification of downloading an e-book, but you don’t need any additional hardware or software to use it.
As for the laws of libraries:
1. There are multiple ways a person can use a book. Some book formats lend themselves more easily to certain uses than others. E-books are a lifesaver for doing research; I’m not sure what major, compelling factors they have for pleasure reading, beyond if you’re into that sort of thing (note a lot of people enjoy books on tape, but it’s a matter of personal taste, situational factors such as spending a lot of time in the car, etc.)
2. Thanks to the internet, there’s a lot of ways readers can find their book, even if they’re not physically present in a local store. Granted, the cost of e-publishing is much lower, thereby allowing books to be created for people’s enjoyment that wouldn’t be otherwise. But I don’t know what percentage of additional *quality* pleasure reading this would result in, as opposed to how much of the market would be flooded with drivel that no publisher would want to touch. (I’m probably being a bit too cynical here.)
3. Does every piece of writing have its reader? I can understand this principle with books that have been published– someone saw some merit in them– but if a 15-year-old who’s only functionally literate moans about breaking up with his girlfriend then puts it in a package and tries to distribute it, is that the same thing? Are people really benefited by having access to it, where they wouldn’t be through traditional publishing sources? I’m all for blogs, but treating anything that can be published as an e-book as a “book” for purposes of this principle, I don’t think it applies.
4. Downloading a book instead of waiting for it to show up in a box does save time. But (and maybe I’m not familiar enough with the capabilities of the future OpenReader) I’m not sure how e-books save people a significant amount of time while doing pleasure-reading. If they happen to have a PDA with them, they’re spared the effort of reaching into a bag and pulling out a physical book (or bringing the book along with them) but a lot of people can barely remember to bring their cell phone with them, not to mention a PDA.
5. Yes, the library is a growing organism. But it doesn’t seem to have a problem with growing. (UofC is spending millions to expand the library to fit all the growth… using robots, which could cause all sorts of problems, but that’s another story.) It could grow a lot faster if people could publish whatever they write as an e-book, but I think a lot of that belongs in the realm of blogs and shouldn’t be considered under the subpoint of the “growing library”. Just as extremely rapid growth in cells is known as cancer, excessive growth of the “library” through materials no one wants to read is not what Ranganathan had in mind, I think.