Looking a gift horse in the mouth

I know you're not supposed to.  But...

A couple months ago I was gifted with a Kindle for my work with an educational group on campus.  Ironically, not long before I got it, I'd had a conversation with my mom about e-readers, and when she asked if I thought I'd ever want one, I said no.

You'd never have guessed that had been my answer if you'd heard my squeals of girlish glee when I opened the box and saw the Kindle.  Apparently, I did want an e-reader!

I've been using the Kindle long enough now, though, that I think I'm ready to weigh in about it.  I nearly wrote that my verdict was "meh," but that's too negative. 

I really do like the thing.  It's especially great for taking to the rec center.  In the past, I've stuck to reading magazines while I'm on the elliptical machine, because they're easier to keep open than a book.  Short of breaking the spine or bringing something to clip or weigh down the sides, there's no way to get a book to lay flat, and holding it open is just a pain. 

 And I love the fact that you can download samples of books--generally, the first couple of chapters.  I've found this especially great for new young-adult books, which I often want to preview as possible texts for my YA lit class.  The samples give enough of a sense of the text to let me know if it's something I want to buy.  

But if I do buy those books, I buy hard copies, because I can't imagine using the electronic text in class, unless everyone was using that text.  At a recent book study group I attended at a local high school, several folks had read the book on their school-provided Nooks, and it was hard to pinpoint specific quotes or passages, since their versions didn't have page numbers.  

E-readers do offer some impressive advantages for course readings, since most allow you to bookmark or highlight text, add notes, and see what other readers have highlighted.  But not being able to get everyone on the same page, literally, is a serious disadvantage.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, my family got together at a cabin in the Hocking Hills of southeastern Ohio.  I'd brought the Kindle along, since I had a couple books on there that I'd downloaded, and wanted to have plenty of reading material.  When I went to grab it on the first night, thinking I'd read in bed, I couldn't find it.  After a prolonged search, I concluded that I must've left it at home after all.  In desperation, the next day I drove into the nearest town and bought a couple of books at WalMart.

I chose two that I ended up loving:  the latest in the Wimpy Kid series, and Rhoda Janzen's memoir Mennonite in a Little Black Dress.  

The first, a sort of hybrid traditional/graphic YA novel, just seems like something that wouldn't work on the Kindle, given the importance of the juxtaposition of the pictures and the text.  The other, of course, would be perfectly adaptable to e-reading, but I loved the book so much that as soon as I got home I passed it along to a friend...something you simply can't do with an electronic book.  

And therein lies my big problem with the Kindle and other e-readers:  they strike me as being inherently undemocratic.  You can't pass books you read on them along to someone else.  And at the moment, most texts are in proprietary formats, so since I use the Kindle, I can't buy or download books from Borders, or the new Google Bookstore.

I've also had some technical problems with the Kindle.  One book I purchased (Scott Westerfeld's Pretties) was so badly formatted it was almost unreadable.  My suspicion, from the kinds of errors it had, was that it was created by scanning the actual printed text.  Nearly every page had some kind of weird glitch like “Urn” for “Um” (as in “Urn, kind of”); “Fm” for “I’m”; and missing periods and other punctuation problems, as in the line "I know that was an unpleasant experience Tally But it was necessary We needed to take our children back from the Smoke, and only you could help us.”

But there were other problems that were less due to formatting and more just, well, unbelievable in a book put out by a big publishing house like Simon & Schuster--to wit, "The icy water crushed her like a vice.”

If it had been a free download, fine.  But I'd paid $9 for it.  Fortunately, Amazon's Kindle site allows readers to report formatting problems with books, and removes them from the store until they're cleaned up.

The bigger problem developed a week or so ago, when a vertical white line appeared on the screen, running all the way from top to bottom.  Initially, I assumed this was a problem with the particular file I was reading, but it turned out to be ubiquitous.  I tried to read past it, but it was really annoying.  After trying the troubleshooting tips Amazon mentions on its site to no avail, I called, and customer service said I'd need to return it.

Again, to Amazon's credit, they were incredibly helpful and generous about it.  I received a new Kindle the very day after I called, and Amazon sent along a link to print a postage-paid return label to send back the defective unit. 

My other concern about e-readers has to do with privacy.  On the one hand, the sort of "plain brown wrapper" nature of the readers themselves allow folks to read whatever they like in public (for example, see this interesting New York Times article about the popularity of romance novels on e-readers).

On the other hand, Amazon knows exactly what I've downloaded, and when, and whether it's still on my Kindle or not.  And because I can only buy books from Amazon, they have comprehensive knowledge of my Kindle library.  

I don't mean to be paranoid about it, but this does make me a little nervous.  In 2002, the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver fought a police order to hand over a particular customer's purchasing history.  This person was wanted on drug charges, and the cops thought they could bolster their case by demonstrating how the books he'd bought at the Tattered Cover incriminated him.  The state Supreme Court ruled in favor of the bookstore, and the case is often held up as a precedent for later decisions that protect the privacy of patrons' library records in terrorism investigations.  

I'd like to say I believe that Amazon would be as vigilant about protecting its customers' right to privacy as the Tattered Cover was.  But I'm not sure I can.  (Ah, Tattered Cover!  How I miss you!)

But for all my trepidation, I still love the Kindle.  And the main thing it's shown me is that all the "e-reader revolution" rhetoric is overblown.  Will they change people's reading habits?  Sure.  Will they replace paper books?  Heck no.  Each format has its own particular functions and aesthetics, and I suspect that people will sort out for themselves which one works best for them in specific contexts.

After all, as devoted a computer user as I am, there are still some things I'll only write by hand:  thank-you notes, grocery lists, comments on student papers.  

And nothing, nothing will ever replace for me the pleasure of browsing through a bookstore--looking at covers, picking up things that look interesting and flipping through them, finding a used copy of an out-of-print mystery that I've been looking for for years.  

But you'd better believe that the next time I go on a long trip, I'll take an equal amount of pleasure in downloading weeks' worth of reading onto a slim device that only weighs a few ounces.