The other night I sat on the porch with some friends and acquaintances discussing this and that. I had my iPad with me, and I was showing a friend what I had been doing with some old books. I explained that the process of getting the books on my iPad involved destroying the physical form of the book so it could gain a new life in digital form. Someone I hardly know got truly offended: “how can you do such a thing to a book?! I love books, and you’re destroying them!” She couldn’t even look at me.

Her reaction might have been mine just a year ago. Until the iPad came out, I would have been the first to argue that our current incarnations of microprocessing technology — the personal computer — does not provide the same reading experience as a book. Period. Perhaps it’s the nature of the machine that necessitates the opposite behaviors that are required to really read. There is something about sitting down in a quiet corner with a book that inspires careful contemplation, thoughtfulness, and introspection. Real reading — the kind that you need to practice to actually take in something in a meaningful and profound way — deserves all of the attention we can bring to it. One thing I’ve learned from teaching is that you never read more carefully than when you know you have to teach something. This I read books: as if I’ll have to teach the text sometime soon. The web? Not so much.

Reading on the web — probably the most popular form of reading done off a computer screen — is not the same thing. I’m not saying that it necessarily can’t be, but in my experience it is not. Something about the computer — even a laptop — inspires a cursory, quick, and superficial consumption of text. Perhaps because it looks more like a television than it does a book? Perhaps we are trained that what comes to us through a monitor should be consumed in a certain way, whereas that which is found on leaves in a cloth binding must be absorbed in another way. Books are like holy artifacts; computers, to paraphrase Norman Mailer, are machines of the devil.

I still hear people say that they can’t proofread or edit on a computer screen. There’s something about the printed word on a physical sheet of paper that allows our minds to take it more seriously than we would something appearing on a computer screen in a web browser. Seriously, I’m pretty sure I could never read a book on a PC.

Perhaps it’s the notion that what we see on the computer screen is somehow transient and impermanent — that it can disappear with a flick of a switch or the press of a key. Books sit heavily on shelves. They are weighty matter that can be handled and not so easily disposed of. Until recently, the idea of publishing was like, in Gilgamesh’s words, “having one’s name stamped in bricks.” If you were mentioned by a poet, you achieved a kind of immortality. “Literature” deserves this treatment, after all. It is weighty. It matters. It should be in books, not on computer screens. Sven Bickerts echoes this sentiment: “our entire collective history–the soul of societal body–is encoded in print. Is encoded, and has for countless generations been passed along by way of the word, mainly through books” (20). This is significant, no?

Birkerts goes on to lament what he sees as an inevitable paradigm shift away from print to the digital. He states that we have lost the ability to read, and now it seems I am destroying books. What’s going on? Am I really committing some sort of heresy against humanity? Against the holy book?

I think not. The iPad is a new medium, something less like a computer and more like a book. Computers are for business; iPads are for personal time. I create on the computer; I enjoy on the iPad. Indeed, these are too easy generalizations, and there are many crossovers between the two, but I use my iPad in a different way than I use my computer. If anything I can say the following: I read more now because of the iPad than I did just a year ago. This is profound because I am a professional reader. Yes, I do it for a living. I enjoy the experience of reading from my iPad more than I do from a paperback book. I can also carry around a library with me on the iPad, dispensing with the need to pack ten books for a short trip.

The only advantage I can still see in using a physical book is that I can more easily annotate it. Yes, I must annotate all of the books I teach. But I do not teach all of the books I read. I predict within the next year that this will not even be an issue. Apple has already made significant improvements to reading PDFs using iBooks. I also predict that we will be using our word processors to easily make EPUB files that are meant to be read from the iPad rather than printed. Long live the trees!

Yes, we are moving closer to being all digital. This is not something to be lamented.

I tried to explain this to my indignant porch friend, but I’m not sure how convincing I was. In fact, like her, I still have an irrational nostalgia for the book — especially when considering rare or new books — that I will discuss later. Also, I’ll discuss the implications for publishing, especially for those of us who have not been too successful in traditional markets.

Work Cited

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994.

I read somewhere (I need to find it again) during graduate school — it might have been Sven Birkerts — that the physical book is an ontological symbol of western knowledge. We’re talking about the medium of the book — the shell or container — not the content. The book signifies knowledge. Its leather, cloth, or paper covers contain all of who we are, know, and dream. These ideas, beliefs, practices, and facts have been invariably linked with the physicality of the book for over two-thousand years, but achieving its zenith only after Gutenberg. Economics, education, and technology all began to look favorably on the book, and as it became more widely available, the content also changed to fit its container. Prose replaced the dominance of verse; perhaps the container just demanded more words to fill its growing pages.

Whomever I speak with about the book — especially academics and English majors — the conversation inevitably takes a turn to the nostalgic or metaphysical. We have a love affair with the book akin to Guy de Bury’s. We venerate the book. It’s something mystical — there’s just nothing like holding a book — smelling its pages — looking through the stacks. This is wisdom itself sitting securely on our shelves. All we need to do to understand a person’s identity is look at her bookshelf. First, if there’s a sheer number of books, she must be educated, or really smart. And, if we even have a cursory education or cultural awareness, we might even recognize some names on the spines, further defining the owner’s identity. Mailer and Morrison? What do we do with that? These books never even have to be touched for them to signify and identify.

The one I hear most frequently: “I can take a book in the bathtub with me.” Am I the only one who’s never taken a bath with a book?

As you can imagine, since I am both an academic and a former English major, I have quite a few books. I used to have more, especially cheap paperbacks, but after several moves and lugging boxes of the things (books ain’t light), I got rid of some of them. I recently redecorated both my office on campus and my home office, and this required moving all of my books around (again!). During these moves, I noticed that many of my books — especially those paperbacks — were beginning to break down. Not only were the spines deteriorating, but the pages were yellowing and becoming brittle. Most of these were collections of science fiction that I liked to keep on-hand. I never knew when I might teach a sf course. Whereas just six months ago, I would have just put these books back on the shelf and hoped they would be OK when I needed them, now I knew what I could do to save them.

I began cutting them up.

In order to have new life, first you must die to your current one.

In his The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil suggests that soon we’ll be able to scan a human brain into a computer, much like you would a photo. At first, this digitizing of the neurons and neural connections would be invasive and destructive before more advanced technologies would allow for non-destructive scans. Scanning a book is much like that. First, I have to cut off the spine to make each page separate so they can slide through the scanner. We just happen to have one of those industrial paper cutters in the department. It takes me about a minute to have a spineless paperback, literally.

Once the spinectomy is complete, the scanning can begin. I scan the covers at a higher resolution and in color. I put the pages through in black-and-white mode, at a slightly lower resolution. Since the final form of the scanned books will be PDF, I want the size manageable, but I also want a good product. As you can see by the video snippet, sometimes pages don’t come through perfectly, requiring a second, more careful scan. Eventually, I get them all through. Yes, the scanner digitizes both the front and back of the page at the same time.

Making a PDF.

Once the scanning is complete, I use Acrobat to optimize the PDF. This performs optical character recognition (OCR) on the book, so I can make it searchable and cut and paste from it. It will also reduce the size of the final PDF considerably. Finally, I add bookmarks for the significant sections of the book.

Bookmarks within Acrobat

Once all of the above is finished — between twenty and forty-five minutes, depending on the size of the book — I can deliver the final ebook to my iPad.

My PDF bookshelf in iBooks.

Apple just updated iBooks, so PDFs can now be read alongside their ebooks (in EPUB format). The first six of these books shown in the picture above, I scanned myself. The PDF without a cover is one I made for teaching; more about that later.

The Scanned Cover.

Tapping on the book’s icon in the menu will open the book. Here, I opened the book for the first time, so it lands on the cover. However, when I open it later, it will open to the page I was last reading.

Thumbnails of each page in the book.

I can view the pages as thumbnails. I don’t find this as useful as looking at bookmarks (see below), but it allows a quick bird’s-eye view of the PDF’s contents. Another drawback to this view is that it takes a long time for iBooks to render pages in high-resolution PDFs. This is not really an issue for normal reading, but to view thumbnails, it can take a long time.

Chapter one with iBook's menus.

IBook’s menus allow for brightness control, bookmarking, and searching. Across the bottom is the entire PDF in wee-tiny thumbnails. It looks kind cool, but I’m not sure how useful it is.

Ready to read.

With a tap to the center of the screen, you can dismiss iBook’s menus and begin reading. You go to the next page by running your finger across the page from right to left. Even in the low-res picture above, the text is very readable. With the iPad’s beautiful screen, the text is even better than it is in the original paperback. Notice that yellow pages are now a crisp white. I think that software will improve with time to allow us to get rid of some of the artifacts, too.

Text enlarged.

With a higher-resolution scan, you can also pinch to expand. I’m going to play with these setting some more. It could be that I can use a much lower scanning resolution and achieve a more sprightly PDF without sacrificing quality.

With OCRed text, iBooks can search for keywords.

OCR is not perfect, but it’s pretty darn good. Not only is Acrobat’s optimization good for shrinking the file size, but it allows for searching within the text. Apple added the ability to annotate EPUB files — the ones you purchase from them — and I hope they allow the same for PDFs in a future upgrade.

Bookmarks in GoodReader.

Another omission in iBooks is a list of bookmarks. The above photo shows the same PDF in GoodReader, an alternate etext viewer for the iPad. GoodReader has a bookmark menu, so you can easily jump to any bookmark within the PDF.

To date, I have scanned about a dozen books. To me, they have a new life. Yes, I had to literally destroy the original to make a digital copy, but this process has its advantages. One, I can now easily carry all of those books with me on my iPad. In just what I’ve scanned, I probably have a year’s worth of reading material. I no longer have to decide with books to grab for our week-long trip to the beach; I’ll just take them all. I also scanned a couple of books that I haven’t read, but have been meaning to. Again, they’re ready when I am.

I will have more to say about this soon. In fact, it will be the subject of my paper for this year’s Norman Mailer Society conference. Are there negatives? Yup. I’ll discuss those next.

I think we ought to read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us with a blow in the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the kind of books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into the forests far from everyone, like suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.