Reading Gets Wired

By Lev Grossman

There's a clip from a Norwegian sketch-comedy show making the rounds on YouTube. It's called "Middle Ages Tech Support," and it's about a medieval monk who's having trouble with a new piece of technology, something called a "book." He gets his tech-support guy in to walk him through it. "Compared to the scroll," the monk complains, "it takes longer to turn the pages ..." And so on. Maybe it's funnier in Norwegian.

But I know how the monk feels, because I have on my desk the would-be successor to the book. It's called the Sony Reader, and it's designed to do for the book what the iPod did for music: that is, usher it, skipping gaily, into the paradise of portable digital consumption. The Reader is a sleek, soigne little object--you can almost sense it trying to look literary, as though it should come with a decanter of sherry as a USB peripheral. Although it's slightly smaller and thinner than a trade paperback, one Sony Reader can hold about 80 average-length novels.

The Reader is merely the tangible expression of a kind of technological Manifest Destiny. Just about everybody in both the entertainment and the technology worlds believes that it is the fate of all media to shed their analog past and transubstantiate into pure data. Newspapers are becoming websites, photos are becoming JPEGs, and songs are becoming MP3s. But what does this great digital awakening mean for the book? To find out, I--as the only person in the U.S. who has never read Khaled Hosseini--downloaded his novel onto a Sony Reader. Kite Runner, meet Blade Runner.

It's notoriously difficult to read large amounts of text on an electronic screen, so the Reader comes with a gentle, matte display that doesn't glow or flicker. Its frame rate is extremely slow, and the contrast is weak, but at least it doesn't make you feel as if your retinas were peeling off. If your eyes are weary and feeble from years of abuse, as mine are, you can even hit a button on the Sony Reader to make the text bigger.

But you can't search the text of a book using the Sony Reader, and that's a disappointment, since searchability is one of the main reasons to digitize a book in the first place. Google is spending a fortune to scan millions of library books into a massive database because to Google's all-seeing eye, books are a hopelessly inefficient way to store information. That doesn't mean books are obsolete. You can use Google Books to retrieve a single valuable snippet of information from a book, but you could never actually read a whole book on a computer screen. The Sony Reader isn't going to displace the humble book anytime soon either. Just to get Kite Runner onto the Reader, I had to charge it, find a computer running Windows XP--we're a Mac shop around here--stare down a cryptic error message and update some software. The half-second delay when you press the turn-the-page button eventually becomes maddening, and you can't scribble in the Reader's virtual margins. Nor can you throw it across the room, should its contents displease you, since it costs $350.

If anything, the Reader reminds us that 5 1/2 centuries after its 1.0 release, the book is a surprisingly robust piece of information technology. Sure, its memory is relatively tiny--one novel adds up to less than a megabyte. But it doesn't need charging, and it never crashes. Its interface is rapidly and intuitively navigable. The scroll never stood a chance.