Oscar Wilde For Beginners

My Sony PRS-505 is a real treat, easily my favorite all-time gizmo.

No more dead-tree books for me if I can get them digitally. I realize this won't be universally true, ever, especially as my tastes are eclectic and often far from the commercial norm; but it's going to be more possible as time goes by. No, I'm not expecting Thomas Bernhard in digital form any time soon. But I should point out it wasn't cheap or easy getting him in paper, either. So there.

Generally, shopping at the Sony eBook Store is pretty painless. I do it by booting into Windoze on the Mac. Are prices fair? Not fair enough, as reflects a top-heavy corporate publishing world heaving under its profit demands. (Something like the mp3 revolution will soon set it straight.) But as weighed against waiting on a book I want to read now and as against buying a smelly used copy, it's a value proposition I accept. I've bought a couple books from Sony in the month I've had my Reader -- Gary Shteyngart's delicious satirical novel The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Andrzej Sapkowski's droll arcane fantasy "witcher" stories, The Last Wish.) As the image above from the Sony store shows, though, there are still a few small kinks to work out.

Choosing the Sony Reader wasn't hard. The community at Mobileread.com was helpful for model comparisons and answering questions. The Sony technology I've owned has performed well (indeed more reliably than Apple hardware), and its marginally more open platform for ebook formats was a critical advantage. I didn't see myself being tethered to Amazon.com, figuratively or literally by way of its Whispernet. The Kindle has lock-in written all over it.

The Sony experience? Invisible, as it should be.  The e-ink is gorgeous in a just-minted way, and the page turning swift.  Holding a leather cover (detachable from the slender Reader) is at least as pleasant as holding a paperback and much lighter than a hardcover.  I find the page-turning buttons a small weak point: ergonomically positioned, some click louder than I'd like. This matters when you are trying not to wake up your dear, light-sleeping wife. But as I say the device is lovable, in the way an Eames chair is lovable: beauty and practicality merge in it like fond hands entwined.

Of course to read ebooks is fairly controversial in some quarters. Denunciations abound. Many of these are gurgles from a vanishing world, a few nostalgic to the point of preciousness or crabby in their demand for the old order. 

"Decimation of context," as electronic culture foe Sven Birkerts thunders in The Atlantic Monthly online, is a fair complaint.  Some context vanishes when physicality elides into the digital. My pal Nik, for instance, showing me his own handicraft, a book bound by hand; that's a context no ebook device will ever broach.  The ancient texts my philologist friend Evelyn has been translating and annotating for decades; again, context.  Even my old childhood paperback copy of The Fellowship of the Ring (the first place I encountered the name W.H. Auden), handed down from one reader to the next, provides qualities that will go missing from ebooks: linkages, associations, book sharing, even the sour passport of must. But grousing about context is also more -- it's sneakily an appeal for authority to be kept in someone very much like, oh, say, Birkerts, a critic, scholar and administrator. The context most feared to be in danger may be his own.

Much in the same spirit was lit-crit giant Harold Bloom's earlier denunciation of the Internet as a place where there are no "intellectual and aesthetic standards of judgment." (So?  Even offline, Bloom finds this to be true. Visiting at Stanford in the late 90s, he perceived opposition to his ideas at a debate as so "abusive" that he ordered opposing scholars off the stage.) Bloom has since gone on to deplore ebooks. It's wildly hard for these old men to accept the world changing.

Hard for all of us, in truth, sometimes. Stick to paper if you must. That's a country for old men.