Kindling

My ideal interior design is Japanese - clean lines, light filtered through translucent screens, spareness, reconfigurability.  If you swing by our place some time, you may be able to see some of this.  But most likely youl'll see a clutter of papers, assorted piles of books, bookshelves that don't quite jibe with each other, and a motley range of clashing colors adorning the books' covers (and when I sort my books - rarely -it's by subject and then alpabetical - not for color and size as my designer side would like to see it).  And those books mean a lot to me - as I run my eyes over the shelves I remember reading Nana on a train in Italy, Vida one long night in Australia and so forth.  It's not just my eyes which get the pleasure though.  I don't go quite as far as Charles Lamb on this one, but I do love the smell of a good book, the touch of its pages (especially say those great Dover paperbacks from the 80s) and the turning of a page.

So I have a design desideratum clashing with a sensual pleasure - gosh, guess which one wins.  For the world as a whole, we have an environmental problem clashing with a vastly successful industry: publishing is a huge business, and surely a good Dostoyesky is worth a copse... .  One estimate I saw online is that it takes 12 trees to make a ton of newsprint, and there's a heck of a lot of newsprint around.  I don't have time to track down how much is recycled, but I do know that an unreasobable portion of the earth's resources are being spent stocking those bookhselves of mine.

Now there have been arguments for the past hundred-odd years that we are just about to see the demise of the book - the magic technology of the 1920s was microfilm, which would bring the complete Library of Congress into the average person's home.... .  If you've ever spent time reading microfilms you would do well to shudder, but otoh if they'd done it the readers would be better (interesting time period that by the way - we had electric cars which worked pretty well back then but they never got the market share - what goes around comes around).  THe latest prospect is the e-book.  I've tried two recent models - the Sony ebook reader and the Kindle.  The first didn't really work for me - I didn't much like the interface.  But worst of all I treated it as a book - tossed it to the floor one night in bed when I wanted to go to sleep and stepped on it the next morning.  I didn't have the heart to replace it.  So I decided to early-adopt the Kindle, which went fine for a few weeks (I was getting totally addicted) and then it just stopped working.  Now I have a replacement, and am well into it.

It's a lovely machine - feels good in the hand, page turning is easy and elegant, the menus are fine.  I can read it in one hand or two, can take it out into bright daylight or read indoors.  The hook for me is that when I travel I like to take along a couple of science fictions (current has been the Soothsayer trilogy by Resnick) which I will then throw away, give away or assortedly banish from my presence.  Now it's all there in one little package - when I've finished reading it I can zip it back over to Amazon and download at will some other time.

But it's a problematic machine too.  Richard Stallman, who spoke at SCU a few weeks back calls it the Swindle.  His argument against is that it's structured so that one of the great features of the book - you can give them out, lend them out and so forth - no longer holds.  Courtesy of digital rights management (DRM), you can no longer share what you own.  For him this means we should be going after the electronic books unless and until the publishing industry cleans up its act.  The problem is that, like cds and dvds, a shared e-book is just as good as the original, so you won't be tempted to buy your own copy if you liked it ... .

So another clash - this time between intellectual freedom and an emergent multinational industry.  Stallman's right in some ways and completely beside the point in others.  Sure, the way its setting up right now is iniquitous and we should work out ways to make it better.  My electronic book of the future will not only look and feel better, but should have some sharing capabilities.  However, he's entirely beside the point in the one way that really matters to me.  We have the possibility now of turning an energy intensive, environmentally damaging industry into one in whose footprint will be much much lighter.  No longer do you need to send manuscripts of to Hong Kong, say, to get them print there, shop back to the States, drive them all over the States and thus scatter a forest to the four winds in order to get your Heidegger fix.  Electronic books are a wonderful idea - we need to work as a society to make it an idea whose time has come.  And my home will look nicer.

Geof Bowker