E-BOOKS

Left right and center I am urged to buy an e-book tablet of some sort, to download this or that, keep a traveling library, to dispose of physical books What books? I ask. I am not aware that Amazon is a particularly well-informed literary critic, no more than is Barnes & Ignoble suited to the task or, for that matter, most publishers. But I yielded to temptation, using someone else's passwords, and asked Kindle to kindly offer me the books I wished to read, books that I normally buy from John Sandoe. Perfectly current, ordinary books, such as John Banville's The Infinities, L.P. Hartley's The Brickfield, Indrisson's Hypothermia, Willaim Trevor's Love and Summer, Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, Nikolas Andreyev's A Month on the Fence, Victor Meyer-Schoenberger's Delete, etc.. Not one of which was available.

Not unsurprisingly, what was available was the equivalent of an Amazon/New York Times best-seller list. Do I detect a whiff of ordinary commercialism? Yes I do, and the lovely arteficial pricing quarrels between book publishers and Amazon Etc. prove it. E-books are no economy. $9.95 may be half the price of a hardbound edition, but it is exorbitant for something that costs Amazon nothing to produce and gives the writer very little back.

The truth of the matter is that the conventional book (with few exceptions) has steadily risen in price and diminished in quality (not only obviously of the content, but also of book-making), and I have been compelled to instruct my regular book-sellers not to send me any books that are perfect-bound, such books being unreadable on a flat surface and having spines that crack and break and pages that tumble out long before one has finished reading. Why should I pay $15 for a poorly-made object? Let's not even mention so-called scholarly books, which are nnow so priced that they are available only to the libraries that are forced to buy them.

These are of course not my only only objection to the e-book. In the case of a classic text, which edition will I receive? How about books in 'foreign', since all America purveys -- as though only English would do -- is of local production? Does Kindle offer you books from England, from Ireland, from Australia? Largely, no. It is as provincial as B&N. Can I fit an iBook or an e-Book in my pocket? Can I have one with me wherever I go? What about the world's Great Book Bazaar, those out-of-the way places where, for want of anything else, one can buy for next to nothing, books one might never otherwise see?

Above all, however, a decline to e-book myself because to do so is to deprive me of history. Its intent is to take me straight to the market: not, for instance, to the many writers of value whose early books are all on ABE second hand, not to the edition I want (e.g., the Clarendon Edition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives, but to the many subsequent editions as sorted out by the professorate) but to the newest, the latest. In keeping with technology of all kinds, e-books exist in a perpetual present tense. And once you've invested in the technology, you can be sure that that $9.95, already exorbitant, will soon rise to $13.95, then $15.95! And soon enough be obsolete.

I close by a curious experience. Among the Google ads was one from Book Collectors, a .com company which promised to make the cataloguing of your library ("I have 800 books," one testimonial read, when I have 18,000) dead easy and automatic. Well, in keeping with the presentism of Amazon & Co, you will not be surprised to learn that this service does indeed work: if your books happen to have a bar-code!