Me & the good old one thousand pages of dead tree

Yesterday I went back to reading Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day”. Sloat Fresno, Deuce Kindred’s sidekick and partner in the murder of Webb Traverse, had just been shot dead in a mexican cantina, and in the next chapter, as it may happen with Pynchon, talk was all about the Riemann zeta-function and its nontrivial zeros.

To give you an idea of the scene: Imagine me in my beloved reading chair, swiss-made, fifteen or so years older than myself, with a faint smell of leather. A serious and beautiful piece of furniture, and, best of all, never mass-produced by Vitra and used in advertisements to make DSL products appeal to Wallpaper wannabes. Okay, so there I am, on a free day, turning pages and trying hard not to think about anything txtr-related. I shouldn’t have chosen Pynchon, for a number of reasons.

The one I’m going into here is the most practical one: I wanted to use our product. I wanted it to be ready and available. If you know the (really nice) Penguin paperback of ‘Against the Day’, you know it’s heavy. Tiresomely heavy. For the first time, I really wanted to read on a txtr reader.

Until now, building reading devices and the web services around digital reading have been a professional thing for me. You see a disruptive technology on the horizon, you go there and make sure things get done properly — that’s just how the game works. But I chose to go into digital reading because I love books, not because I want them to go away. And I always held that eReaders are more about bringing back the daily news (including blogs) to the kitchen table than about replacing paper fiction with digital fiction.

There I was, imagining to trade the Penguin folio against our sleek little device. And tell you what? I still didn’t want to. I didn’t want to trade. I really wanted to read on the txtr reader after two hours with the 1000 pages of dead tree, but I still wanted to have the paperback.

We’ve been discussing this here at txtr for a long time: Like in music or cinema, people do care about the experience. They may want to have “Seven Nation Army” on their iPods, but they also want Meg and Jack to come by and break their noses with the sound of their amplifiers and the help of a couple hundred ecstatic youth in red-and-white t-shirts. Now, the equivalent of having your nose broken by the White Stripes in the reading world is a lucid evening all by yourself, with a glass of fresh orange juice (or whatever does the trick for you), with a book, and all of a sudden, you learn something new; you get it, a surprising way of seeing things. You understand the beauty and honesty of what the author is doing. And you’ll need something to attach your love to. It might be a technological gadget, but they’re short-lived, so why not use a book? Something to come back to twenty years later in a sentimental mood, something to touch, something to show to a person you might fall in love with, on that first evening at your place.

Paper books won’t go away, in the same way that discs and live gigs and cinema screenings didn’t go away and will not. Books are even cheap to make by now — so I suspect we’ll be seeing a scenario where paper books and eBooks are sold as the same product. In a digital world, you pay for access, not for physical media, so no reason you shouldn’t get a paper version and the ebook when purchasing at your local book store.

The publishing industry isn’t ready for such models right now, and we certainly can’t blame them. We need to understand what’s at stake for them, and for us as members of a reading public. Running a publishing house has always been risky and difficult, and publishing is a strange business, where more quality often means greater danger. Carefully editing books often means losing money on almost all of them and hoping for a single one to become a seller. We need to understand that paying for a book doesn’t only support the author of the one book we buy, but also of those ten books we don’t buy. These need to be there nonetheless, as part of a complex cultural ecosystem that the web just cannot simply replace, not as long as the only economic model for web writers is “street performer”. We need publishers, we need people who take the risk for authors and help them along, lest all we get will be street art and weight loss advice from pick-up gurus. (No disrespect, but that’s not enough.)

For now, we’ll just have to wait for the markets to jiggle things in place again, after the digital disruption which is inevitably approaching now. It’s not about being pro or contra eBooks, or even DRM. As always, it’s about putting new technology to use in the right way, and as always, as a civilization, we pretty much know what we want — it’s just working out the details and establishing fair balance that is so difficult.

Half a sunday left, it’s, again, back to Pynchon for me.