G Sampath: Is Kindle Evil, or am I reading too much into it?

I was chatting with the Asia head of an MNC publishing house at an event last week and he told me that in Europe, the printed book market is shrinking every year, while that of e-books is growing. I was dismayed to hear that — but not because I am a technophobe who hates reading on screen (though that is true too).

Nor am I against e-books per se. On the contrary, I believe e-books have helped democratise publishing. Take someone like Amanda Hocking. She wrote 17 novels and couldn’t sell any of them to publishers. She finally self-published them as e-books and, in less than a year, sold over a million copies and earned $2 million in sales. Publishers of ‘dead-tree books’ are now fawning all over her.

So it is not e-books as such, but the delivery platforms for e-books, the e-readers, like Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook that I consider Evil — yes, evil with a capital E.
I don’t want to dwell too much on the traditionalist objections to devices like Kindle, though I do buy into all of them.

For instance, I can’t ever reconcile myself to a reading regime where an Anna Karenina will come to me in the same font, same format, same weight and same size as, say, The Punk Who Sold His Porsche (or was it a Ferrari?); nor can I live with a ‘library’ where I cannot see the spines (with the bookmarks sticking out like milestones) of the five books I may be reading at a time.

One common but bogus argument in favour of e-readers is to do with storage — oh god, where is the space to store 2,000 books, which I can easily fit into my Kindle? Well, there’s a simpler solution: if you don’t have the space for your books, give them away — let them circulate.

Another bogus argument is to do with how e-readers are more environment-friendly — they help save paper, trees, etc. But electronic devices like Kindle, made of metal, silicon and plastic, not to mention rare earth elements, cannot be produced without fossil fuel extraction, without mining (which is the single most evil thing one can do to the planet), and without the millions of tons of carbon emissions caused by manufacture, transportation, etc. So e-readers are more, not less, environmentally damaging than the printed book, which is at least made of a renewable resource: wood pulp.

A more insidious danger from e-readers is the threat they pose to the entire cultural fabric in which reading happens. In a world where Kindle is King, you can’t lend, borrow, steal, copy or gift books. Or tear pages from a copy, or burn a book, or visit second-hand bookshops, or spill coffee on a page, or have a moth-eaten or dog-eared or rain-drenched-and-then-sun-dried old copy of an old book; nor can you tongue-wet your finger (yuck, but still) and flip a page, or use a bookmark, or feel between thumb and forefinger the delicious yet regrettably dwindling thickness of the last 100 pages of a 900-pager.

Indeed, to read a book in percentages is the ultimate insult to a habit first acquired in the cradle of leisure and the lazy afternoons of summer vacations; it represents the surrender of a reading aesthetic that one imbibes in the cynical idealism of youth,
to a programmatic pragmatism that reeks of vile things like statistics.

But the most sinister impact of e-readers will be on reader rights. The funny thing being that I’ve been a reader most of my life, and never knew I had rights as a reader until e-readers came up with the idea of taking them away.

Richard Stallman has written about it in detail, but let me cite his three major points: 1. When you buy an e-book on Kindle or any e-reader, you don’t own the book like you would a printed book, you only buy a license to read it, or in other words, rent it; 2. Amazon can, using a ‘backdoor’, destroy an e-book you have paid for and downloaded on your Kindle — it has already done so once, in 2009, destroying thousands of copies of George Orwell’s 1984 (a little too ironic, don’t you think?), but nobody can (legally) destroy a printed book that you own; 3. If you use a Kindle, you can only buy your e-books from Amazon, or if you own a Nook e-reader, only from Barnes & Noble. This is like someone saying, you can only ever buy books from Crossword, no other shop.

So is it wise to give up fundamental freedoms that we take for granted — all of it just for the sake of ‘convenience’? Well, each reader has to make that decision for herself. But this is the case with every new technology: because technological advances are often driven (or modified) by the desire for profit, they end up bartering away one’s freedom in some way.

In this case, a printed book needs no proprietary technology for you to read it, apart from your eyes (given for free by god/nature); but with e-books, you need a proprietary technology (e-readers) over which you have no control — restricting your freedom and increasing your dependence on technology at the same time. We are encouraged to consider this ‘progress’. I would read it differently.