The Way the World Works: Essays (23 page)

Within, lying faceup in a white-lined casket, was the device itself. It was pale, about the size of a hardcover novel, but much thinner, and it had a smallish screen and a QWERTY keyboard at the bottom made of tiny round pleasure-dot keys that resisted pressing. I gazed at the keys for a moment and thought of a restaurant accordion.

The plug, which was combined with the USB connector, was extremely well designed, in the best post-Apple style. It was a very, very good plug. I turned the Kindle on and pressed the Home key. Home gives you the list of what you’ve got in your Kindle. There were some books that I’d already ordered waiting for me—that was nice—and there was also a letter of greeting from Jeff Bezos. “Kindle is an entirely new type of device, and we’re excited to have you as an early customer!” Bezos wrote. I read the letter and some of
His Majesty’s Dragon
(a dragon fantasy by Naomi Novick set during the Napoleonic Wars, given away free),
Gulliver’s Travels,
and
Slow Hands,
a freebie Harlequin Blaze novel by Leslie Kelly. I changed the type size. I searched for a text string. I tussled with a sense of anticlimax.

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?

I showed it to my wife. “Too bad it doesn’t have a little kickstand,” she said. “You could prop it up like a dresser mirror and read while you eat.” My son clicked around in the Kindle edition of a Bernard Cornwell novel about ancient Britain. “It’s not that bad,” he said. “The map looks pretty good. Some of the littler names aren’t readable. I’d rather be reading that”—pointing to his Cornwell paperback, which was lying facedown nearby—“but I can definitely read this.”

Yes, you can definitely read things on the Kindle. And I did. Bits of things at first. I read some of De Quincey’s
Confessions
, some of Robert Benchley’s
Love Conquers
All,
and some of several versions of Kipling’s
The Jungle Book
. I squeezed no new joy from these great books, though. The Gluyas Williams drawings were gone from the Benchley, and even the wasp passage in
Do Insects Think?
just wasn’t the same in Kindle gray. I did an experiment. I found the Common Reader reprint edition of
Love Conquers All
and read the very same wasp passage. I laughed: ha-ha. Then I went back to the Kindle 2 and read the wasp passage again. No laugh. Of course, by then I’d read the passage three
times, and it wasn’t that funny anymore. But the point is that it wasn’t funny the first time I came to it, when it was enscreened on the Kindle. Monotype Caecilia was grim and Calvinist; it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words.

Reading some of
Max,
a James Patterson novel, I experimented with the text-to-speech feature. The robo-reader had a polite, halting, Middle European intonation, like Tom Hanks in
The Terminal,
and it was sometimes confused by periods. Once it thought
miss.
was the abbreviation of a state name: “He loved the chase, the hunt, the split-second intersection of luck and skill that allowed him to exercise his perfection, his inability to Mississippi.” I turned the machine off.

And yet, you know, many people loved it. To be fair to the Kindle, I had to make it through at least one whole book. Jeff Bezos calls this “long form” reading. I had some success one morning when I Kindled my way deep into
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Erotic Romance,
by Alison Kent. There are, I learned, four distinct levels of intensity in the erotic-romance industry: sweet, steamy, sizzling, and scorching. This seemed like pertinent information, since romance readers are major Kindlers. “The success of the ebook is being fueled by the romance and erotic romance market,” Peter Smith, of ITworld, reports. Smith cites the actress and Kindle enthusiast Felicia Day, of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
who has been bingeing on paranormals like
Dark Needs at Night’s Edge
. “I’ve read like, 6 books this week and ordered about 10 more,” Day blogged. “It’s stuff I never would have checked out at the Barnes and Noble, because the gleaming and oily man chests would have made me blush too much.”

But e-romances don’t fully explain the Kindle’s success—and the kind of devotion that it inspires. To find out more, I went to Freeport, Maine, to talk to Eileen Messina, the manager of the British-imports store just across from L.L. Bean. Messina, a thoughtful, intelligent woman in her thirties, has all kinds of things on her Kindle, including
Anna Karenina,
Murakami’s
Kafka on the Shore
, books by Dan Simmons and Abraham Verghese, and the comic novel
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
. She is so happy with it that she has volunteered, along with about a hundred others, to show it off to prospective purchasers, as part of Amazon’s “See a Kindle in Your City” promotion. Her Kindle was in her purse; she’d crocheted a cover for it out of green yarn. In the past, she said, she’d taken books out of the library, but some of them smelled of smoke—a Kindle book is a smoke-free environment. I thanked her and bought some digestive biscuits and a teapot, and then I went next door to Sherman’s Books and Stationery. I asked Josh Christie, who worked there, to recommend a truly gut-churningly suspenseful novel. I was going to do a comparison between the paperback and the Kindle 2 version. Christie suggested
The Bourne Identity
and a book by Michael Connelly,
The Lincoln Lawyer
—one of his colleagues at the shop swore by it. I bought them both.

Outside, I sat on a bench near L.L. Bean, eating an ice cream, and tried to order
The Bourne Identity
wirelessly from the Kindle Store. But no—there is no Kindle version of
The Bourne Identity
. What?

What else was missing? Back home, I spent an hour standing in front of some fiction bookcases, checking on titles. There is no Amazon Kindle version of
The Jewel in the Crown
. There’s no Kindle of Jean Stafford, no Vladimir
Nabokov, no
Flaubert’s Parrot,
no
Remains of the Day
, no
Perfume
by Patrick Suskind, no Bharati Mukherjee, no Margaret Drabble, no Graham Greene except a radio script, no David Leavitt, no Bobbie Ann Mason’s
In Country
, no Pynchon, no Tim O’Brien, no
Swimming-Pool Library,
no Barbara Pym, no Saul Bellow, no Frederick Exley, no
World According to Garp,
no
Catch-22,
no
Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
no
Portnoy’s Complaint,
no
Henry and Clara,
no Lorrie Moore, no
Edwin Mullhouse,
no
Clockwork Orange
.

Of course, the title count will grow. It will grow because not-so-subtle forces will be exerted on publishers and writers. Below the descriptions of all non-Kindle books for sale on Amazon, there’s a box that says, “Tell the Publisher! I’d like to read this book on Kindle.” If you click it, Amazon displays a thank-you page: “We will pass your specific request on to the publisher.”

But say you’ve actually found the book you’re seeking at the Kindle Store. You buy it. Do you get what’s described in the catalog copy? Yes and no. You get the words, yes, and sometimes pictures, after a fashion. Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don’t fare so well on the little gray screen. Page numbers are gone, so indexes sometimes don’t work. Trailing endnotes are difficult to manage. If you want to quote from a book you’ve bought, you have to quote by location range—e.g., the phrase “She was on the verge of the mother of all orgasms” is to be found at location range 1596–1605 in Mari Carr’s erotic romance novel
Tequila Truth
.

When you buy the Kindle edition of Konrad Lorenz’s
King Solomon’s Ring,
rather than the paperback version, you save three dollars and fifty-eight cents, but the fetching illustrations by Lorenz of a greylag goose and its goslings
walking out from the middle of a paragraph and down the right margin are separated from the text—the marginalia has been demarginalized. The Kindle Store offers
The Cheese Lover’s Cookbook & Guide,
from Simon & Schuster. “The picture of the Ricotta Pancakes with Banana-Pecan Syrup may just inspire you enough to make it the first recipe you want to try,” one happy Amazon reviewer writes. She’s referring to the recipe in the print edition, the description of which is reused in the Kindle Store—there’s no pancake picture in the Kindle version.

Yes, you can save nine dollars if you buy the Kindle edition of
The Algorithmic Beauty of Seaweeds, Sponges, and Corals
, by Jaap A. Kaandorp and Janet E. Kübler—it’ll cost you $85.40 delivered wirelessly, versus $94.89 in print.
New Scientist
says that the book is “beautifully, if sometimes eccentrically, illustrated with photographs, drawings and computer simulations.” The illustrations are there in the Kindle version, but they’re exceedingly hard to make out, even if you zoom in on them using the five-way clicker switch, or “control nipple,” as one Kindler called it. An award-winning medical textbook titled
Imaging in Oncology
(second edition) is for sale in the Kindle Store for $287.96. Tables are garbled. The color coding—yellow for malignancy, blue for healthy tissue—has been lost. Arrows pointing to shadowy tumors become invisible in the gray. Indeed, the tumors themselves disappear.

One more expensive example. The Kindle edition of
Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems,
an e-book for people who design nuclear power plants, sells for more than eight thousand dollars. Figure 2 is an elaborate chart of a reaction scheme, with many callouts and chemical equations. It’s totally illegible. “You Save: $1,607.80 (20%),”
the Kindle page says. “I’m not going to buy this book until the price comes down,” one stern Amazoner wrote.

Here’s what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon. The company uses an encoding format called Topaz. (
Topaz
is also the name of a novel by Leon Uris, not available at the Kindle Store.) There are other e-book software formats—Adobe Acrobat, for instance, and Microsoft Reader, and an open format called ePub—but Amazon went its own way. Nobody else’s hardware can handle Topaz without Amazon’s permission. That means you can’t read your Kindle books on your computer, or on an e-book reader that competes with the Kindle. (You can, however, read Kindle books on the iPod Touch and the iPhone—more about that later—because Amazon has decided that it’s in its interest to let you.) Maybe you’ve heard of the Sony Reader? The Sony Reader’s page-turning controls are better designed than the Kindle’s controls, and the Reader came out more than a year before the Kindle did; also, its screen is slightly less gray, and its typeface is better, and it can handle ePub and PDF documents without conversion, but forget it. You can’t read a Kindle book on a Sony machine, or on the Ectaco jetBook, the BeBook, the iRex iLiad, the Cybook, the Hanlin V2, or the Foxit eSlick. Kindle books aren’t transferable. You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.

On the other hand, there’s no clutter, no pile of paperbacks next to the couch. A Kindle book arrives wirelessly: it’s untouchable; it exists on a higher, purer plane.
It’s earth-friendly, too, supposedly. Yes, it’s made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years. But no tree farms are harvested to make a Kindle book; no ten-ton presses turn, no ink is spilled.

Instead of ink on paper, there’s something called Vizplex. Vizplex is the trade name of the layered substance that makes up the Kindle’s display—i.e., the six-inch-diagonal rectangle that you read from. It’s a marvel of bi-stable microspheres, and it took lots of work and more than 150 million dollars to develop, but it’s really still in the prototype phase. Vizplex, in slurry form, is made in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a company called E Ink. E Ink layers it onto a film, or “frontplane laminate,” at a plant in western Massachusetts, and then sends the laminate to Taiwan, where its parent company, P.V.I. (which stands for Prime View International, itself a subsidiary of a large paper company), marries it to an electronic grid, or backplane. The backplane tells the frontplane what to do.

The prospect of Vizplex first arose in the mind of a scientist, Joseph Jacobson, who now works at M.I.T.’s Media Lab and avoids interviews on the subject of e-paper. Sometime in the mid-nineties, according to a colleague, Jacobson was sitting on a beach reading. He finished his book. What next? He didn’t want to walk off the beach to get another book, and he didn’t want to lie on the beach and dig moist holes with his feet, thinking about the algorithmic beauty of seaweeds. What he wanted was to push a little button that would swap
the words in the book he held for the words in some other book somewhere else. He wanted the book he held to be infinitely rewriteable—to be, in fact, the very last book he would ever have to own. He called it “The Last Book.” To make the Last Book, he would have to invent a new kind of paper: RadioPaper.