David Sedaris knows at least one way to write on a Kindle.

Whether we care to realize it or not, eBooks and eReading devices alter our habits as readers and how we interact with books. The issue of writing in (e)books is still a topic of debate among the bibliophile crowd. After all, eReading devices like the Kindle aren’t called eWriting devices for a reason — although, Barnes & Noble’s strategy with billing the Nook Color as the first-ever “Reader’s Tablet” may portend a blurring in the distinction between reading/writing devices.

Writing on digital books can also be taken quite literally. Example: David Sedaris signing a fan’s Kindle, with the Delphian scribble: “This bespells doom.” Always one to have a funny story to add to a funny story, Sedaris adds, “that he has actually signed ‘at least five’ Kindles, and ‘a fair number of iPods as well, these for audio book listeners.’ A frequent chronicler of his own eccentricities, the author often encounters his readers’ quirks at the book-signing table. ‘The strangest thing I’ve signed is a woman’s artificial leg,’ Mr. Sedaris continued in his e-mail message.”

Marks on a book are a way of personalizing the object, which is precisely the topic that The Guardian’s Books Blog (“Defacing books: the effluence of engagement“) takes up. Physically altering a book is an intrinsic part of the reading process, perhaps even providing our future selves a clue of  past self: “… the person I was when reading it: how I was feeling, where I was sitting, whom I was with.”

Probably my favorite story on this topic was this Vladimir Nabokov anecdote from The New Yorker in his copy of “Fifty-five Short Stories from The New Yorker, 1940-1950” — with a perfectly delivered punchline at the end:

“Nabokov was also a professor of literature, and in his copy of the New Yorker anthology he gave every story a letter grade … Many of the stories did not fare too well, and would not have got their authors into a selective university. Top marks went to Jessamyn West’s “The Mysteries of Life in an Orderly Manner” (A-) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (A). Prof. Nabokov awarded only two stories in the anthology an A+: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” by J. D. Salinger, and “Colette,” by Vladimir Nabokov.” Read more →

I don’t know how to feel about this one (news courtesy of @bookbench).

“How To Make a Kindle Cover from a Hollowed Out Hardback Book” is a rather clever compromise for people who appreciate the gadgetness of the Kindle, but still have a preference for that reassuring feel of a printed book.  A few noteworthy thoughts on the sameness and difference of the reading experience:

“But each reading feels the same. The only difference is the words you read and your reaction to them. You begin to miss that sometimes rough feel of a hardback book, along with the slick, almost slippery design of a paperback. Each book seems to have a smell of its own, something unique. And getting your hands dirty with ink from the finely written words was half the journey.

To take some liberties with paraphrasing, it seems that all eBook readings are the same, but all print book readings are unique in their own way:

“The Kindle erases that part of your reading experience. It feels the same, smells the same and even looks the same. Instead of turning pages, which is different sizes, thicknesses and colors from book to book, you’re pressing the same button over and over again.”

The Kindle-in-a-book cover is the result of a self-described “nerd project for the weekend.” I do have to give him this much credit — at least the symbolism isn’t lost on him: “I decided to carve out the pages of a printed book and thus complete the poetic circle of digital book readers destroying the printed word.”

I don’t think I could bring myself to mutilate a book even if to add a more nostalgic feel to Kindle reading (can we feel nostalgic about something that isn’t even gone yet? Hmm).

Books as both a literal and figurative location for hidden things seem to be a rather popular topic, because there is a whole jumble of information online about how to conceal objects within books (even a Wikipedia article – interesting to note how much hiding the use of books for clandestine purposes continues to play upon our collective imagination). Here’s one good set of instructions on how to make a hollow book. Good for hiding all sorts of stuff, like flasks, it seems.

Ok, I’ll admit it. I love writing in my books. It’s my preferred way of interacting with the words on a page  – the physical act of putting pencil to paper is sometimes the only way I can really think an idea through. So this week’s article from The New York Times (“Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in Margins“) caught my attention. As it turns out, the future doesn’t appear as dim as the title might suggest (example: “The digital revolution is a good thing for the physical object …  As more people see historical artifacts in electronic form, the more they’re going to want to encounter the real object”), but that’s okay. There are a few bits of entertaining book trivia worth sharing.

For example, the Newberry Library collection in Chicago noted in the article has a number of famous old books, including  a copy of “The Federalist” with Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten notes, which I think is very much as cool as it sounds.

Reading is a necessarily private experience, a transaction between a person and the printed words within a book. But it needn’t be a purely internal process. The historian Studs Terkel felt “that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.” A great deal could be learned from books than simply the words on the page; what occurs on the margins can lend insight into the habits and attitudes (good and bad, insightful and dull) of readers in a given historical time. Sociologically, it could be an interesting area of study (for someone else to study, not me). H.J. Jackson (Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, Yale University Press 2001) adds that,“marginalia reveals a pattern of emotional reactions among everyday readers that might otherwise be missed, even by literary professionals.”

The term “marginalia” is often associated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, himself a prolific margin writer, in the sort of way that an activity existed long before someone came up with a name for it. Speaking of which, the article thoughtfully includes “Marginalia” by Billy Collins, which rhapsodizes that act of marking up pages which librarians must hate so much:

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?!"

Not surprisingly, Mark Twain had many opinions which he wanted to share, even if only with the pages of his book*. Also not surprisingly, his opinions could be quite caustic: “A cat could do better literature than this,” he onces writes of a particularly bland offering. That’s just silly though. It’s not like we’re talking about monkeys at typewriters here.

In a related piece, The New Republic (“Amazon’s Public Notes and the Future of Reading”) discusses the implications for reader notes in light of the Amazon’s newly released Public Notes feature. While some have bemoaned the inability of ebooks to accommodate the pencil-to-paper interaction of reader and text, something like Amazon’s Public Notes does appear to be a step towards turning that solitary experience of reading into something inherently more social. Any Kindle user so inclined can choose to share their notes and highlights.**

In addition to a few gripes about the limitations — such as the 100-character limit for all public notes — the more interesting question raised in the TNR article is how note-sharing might change the way readers decide to think about note-taking.

“But another, bigger part of the problem with Public Notes is that marginalia has always been primarily a private form of communication, like a diary: a place for readers to mark lines with a particular personal meaning or to jot notes to themselves … To open it up for public consumption requires a rethinking of its purpose.”

Would we self-censor our note-taking habits, if we knew that we’d be publishing those half-articulated thoughts jotted down while reading to anonymous Internet users, as opposed to having our innermost thoughts safely locked away within the pages of our book on a bookshelf? Perhaps. Then again, maybe the relative anonymity of the Internet means that such self-censoring is moot. Public Notes is an interesting social experiment well worth trying. Maybe it’ll provide some kind of insight into the collective Kindle readers’ consciousness, some fleeting sense of online zeitgest, or maybe just some really good Amazon market research. Who knows?

*The Mark Twain House blog has some great images of Mark Twain marginalia.

* *See here for Amazon’s running list of the most publicly noted Kindle books. Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland, and Stieg Larsson are in the early lead.

“No Kindles allowed”? That was the premise of this New York Times article (“Some Cafes Bar the Door to Kindles and iPads“). That in itself probably wasn’t enough for an  interesting article, since it seems to be less of a value judgment on e-book readers, than it is a drink-your-coffee-and-get-out business practice. But since Virginia Heffernan uses this as an opportunity to discuss the character and history of cafes — along with a Montesquieu reference here and a Sartre* reference there —  the article is certainly worth a quick read.

What caught my attention was the mention of ”the fine art of public solitude” — certainly something that carried resonance. (Who hasn’t resorted to iPod headphones to muffle the noises of neighboring patrons sharing their mutually dumb screenplay ideas while we try to read or write at the local Starbucks?). Writing and reading are generally rather solitary activities, and yet, how is that the compulsion of private activities — reading and writing — coexist in an inherently social setting like the coffee shop?

In the Age of Enlightenment Europe, the coffee shop served as a significant space for intellectual and political foment, and even as an exclusive site of the meeting of the minds (it’s a long way from the modern-day Starbucks, but  the “Penny University” of 18th-century London served as a vital hub of intellectual life).

On this topic, Harvard’s always-interesting Robert Darnton in The New York Review of Books (“Blogging, Now and Then“) traces an interesting historical genealogy from the blog as a form of communication as we now know it, to the early-modern preceding forms of communication which originated in the coffee shops of 18th century Paris. Darnton (while pointing out the irony of writing about the metacriticism of writing about blogs on a blog) is one of the best writers on the history and future of the book, including his collection of essays, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future.

The Los Angeles Times also weighs in on “anti-Kindle prejudice” at the coffee shop and the vagueness of the Kindle/device/computer debate. The article suggests a double standard  at play — is a person sitting and reading a 1,100 page Stephen King paperback novel more or less likely to sit and take up space for hours than another person reading the same book on the Kindle?

But, as if to prove that Newton’s Third Law also applies to coffee shops and eBooks, there are at least some coffee shops which are trading newspapers for iPads to provide to customers.

Les Deux Magots, Paris

* Here’s a picture of my visit to one of the famous Parisian coffee spots frequented by Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (also a preferred hangout spot for the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, and Pablo Picaso). If you want a €10 cup of coffee, that’s the place for you. I’m willing to bet they don’t like Kindles and iPads there either.

John Flowers, from the enjoyably satirical McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, shares that after weeks of extensive testing, the Newspaper is in fact the best news e-reader.

On e-ink vs. uh, just-ink:

“One drawback to The Newspaper display was that it used a much older version of the e-ink employed in some other e-reader displays. As a result, our hands became dirty and a bit oily after just a few minutes of use.”

On connecting to Wi-Fi vs. connecting to the real world:

“What concerned us most about The Newspaper was its lack of Wi-Fi. Information on the system was locked, while on other e-readers it was open, ubiquitous and current. Eventually, however, we found this advantage to be overstated, even misleading. Engineers using The Newspaper typically did so 30 to 60 minutes a day. Afterward, they went outside, formed relationships, and took in what life had to offer. Those using Wi-Fi-enabled e-readers tended to stay on the couch, scanning video sites for cats; eventually, downloading recipes for artichoke cheese dip they’ll never use.”

On the all-important question of, “I wonder if there’s an app for that”:

“The Newspaper also has a great number of apps already downloaded onto the device, ones we have yet to see on any other e-reader. There are the previously mentioned fly-swatting, hat-making, present-wrapping, and tailing people apps. But also the “same ol’ bullshit”, “who’s got the sports section?” and “packing material for my eBay business” apps.”

So there you have it, print-based versatility humorously trumps digital-tech coolness. And, according to Cory Doctorow, you can also turn your print-and-paper version of the newspaper into a weapon. (I’d never heard of a Millwall brick before. Thanks, English football hooligans).

With rumors of a Borders bankruptcy growing noisier with each passing week, the Wall Street Journal has an article connecting the dots between the decline of the book megastore chain, and the rise of eBooks: “Borders’ Woes Help E-Books.” The slow fade of Borders and its 600-something store locations worldwide has been tied to the advent of eBooks, eReader devices (and perhaps Borders’ half-hearted efforts to adapt in the same that Barnes & Noble seems to have done with the Nook), and the rise of Amazon’s market share. A couple of thoughts in the WSJ article quoting the always-interesting Seth Godin:

When Simpsons geekiness and book nerdishness collide: The Lisa Simpson Book Club. I like it. I’ll have to add this to my recent list on Literature and The Simpsons.

A decent selection, too — from Sylvia Plath, to Joyce Carol Oates, and The New Yorker (on microfiche!).

The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik writes about books, toast, and assorted prognostications on the Internet in, “How the Internet Gets Inside Us.” Definitely worth the time to read.*

One way of measuring the social significance of the rather historic rate of technological change we find ourselves living in, is the volume of books written upon that very subject. I appreciate Gopnik’s metacommentary about books on books:

“A series of books explaining why books no longer matter is a paradox that Chesterton would have found implausible, yet there they are, and they come in the typical flavors: the eulogistic, the alarmed, the sober, and the gleeful.”

These types of books on books are summed up into three competing (yet in some cases overlapping) schools of thought: the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. Books and technology are kind of like toast, as it turns out:

When the electric toaster was invented, there were, no doubt, books that said that the toaster would open up horizons for breakfast undreamed of in the days of burning bread over an open flame; books that told you that the toaster would bring an end to the days of creative breakfast, since our children, growing up with uniformly sliced bread, made to fit a single opening, would never know what a loaf of their own was like; and books that told you that sometimes the toaster would make breakfast better and sometimes it would make breakfast worse, and that the cost for finding this out would be the price of the book you’d just bought.

Gatsby Toast

Well, to play further with the books and toast analogy – maybe, at the end of the day, there’s too much of a furor made about the toast itself, when what we really care about is the bread. Ok, that’s enough with that. Mentioned specifically are two of my favorites: Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. (Gopnik also gets points for beginning an article with a Harry Potter reference, ending it with Lord of the Rings reference, and making it work).

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The description of iBooks on Apple.com got me thinking:

“Reading on iPad is just like reading a book. You hold your iPad like a book. You flip the pages like a book. And you do it all with your hands — just like a book … reading is so natural on iPad, the technology seems to disappear.”

Isn’t Apple’s language here interesting? That, by the act of tracing your fingers across a glass surface, the claim is that the technology naturalizes what would seem to be a fundamentally unnatural act of reading a book on a screen.*

This inspired a bit of researching on my part. Let’s see what others have said so far about the experience of reading on the iPad.

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It can be kind of fun to revisit old articles written about the “future of reading.” Nicholson Baker’s New Yorker article on the Kindle comes to mind, written back in the simpler times of August 2009. I suppose a lot of the sense of novelty that characterizes this piece has worn off (novelty can only last so long, and especially with an estimated 8 million Kindles sold).

Baker’s somewhat cheeky — but not entirely inaccurate — description of how the Kindle could influence said Kindle buyer’s reading behavior:

Also worth noting was Jeff Bezos’s description of the experience of reading, and how the Kindle was expected to facilitate that experience:

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