Kindle 451

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Abstract

In most journalistic accounts of e-books it is hard to distinguish the reality from the hype and boosterism that lend a heady air of eventfulness to the subject. People who are attached to physical books don’t make much news, whereas each uptick in sales of e-books has been reported as another step along the way of an e-book “revolution,” a dissymmetry that can make even committed book lovers worry that the days of books might indeed be numbered. One detects this unease in the way they routinely tend to couch their preference for physical books apologetically, defensively, beginning with disclaimers of Luddism that reassure their interlocutors that they aren’t averse to technology per se, but that they just like the “feel” of the book, as if something as frail as a mere feeling couldn’t really be expected to stand up against the mighty tide of history, with its presumed metaphysical right-of-way. But by thus acquiescing in the aura of inevitability that has from the first attended the prospect of an e-book “revolution,” these timid partisans of the book do their own small part to help bring about the outcome they may well secretly dread. Certainly, it is in the interests of our corporate chiefs to promote a general belief in the inevitability of e-books coming to dominate the market if not replacing physical books entirely. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos would very much like us to believe that such a future is inevitable. In a breathless advertisement-cumarticle in Newsweek trumpeting the arrival of the Kindle in 2007 he declares, “it’s so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as a book and improve on it . . .”1 The rhetorical slippage here, from a sentence structure that introduces an intention (“it’s so ambitious to”) to the complement that casts that intention as a fait accompli (“and improve on it”) is telling: in the space of a single sentence the future is collapsed into the present, as the highly evolved book is said to have