The Kindle, Amazon’s new wireless electronic reading device (WERD), is so intuitively designed even people who can’t read can operate it (except for the reading part). It’s twice as portable as the average Stephen King novel, way more booky than a cell phone, and, in the breakthrough that has put it ahead of competitors like the Sony Reader, you don’t need to hook it up to a PC to download new content; it connects directly to Amazon’s digital bookstore and the 90,000 titles for sale there. So even if you’re stuck in an airport bathroom for, say, 2,000 years, you will never have to read James Patterson’s latest thriller twice unless you want to. WERD!
The Kindle isn’t so flawless it’s going to make backpacks and remainder tables obsolete. And yet it works well enough to start entertaining thoughts of our bookless future—and what we might lose when we complete the transition from wireless reading devices made out of murdered redwood trees to wireless reading devices made out of poisonous chemicals and plastic.
No doubt too much ink and paper has already been wasted on the ineffable wonderfulness of ink and paper. But the raw materials of publishing aren’t the only things that devices like the Kindle will torch. The materiality of books has always had metaphorical implications. Books take up space in the world. They’re solid proof that a writer’s thoughts—unlike the abstract, immaterial, insignificant thoughts of regular people—are substantial, weighty, worth preserving.
The Internet can send a writer’s words around the world instantly. It makes even the most trivial scribblings more accessible than a Grisham bestseller. But writers don’t merely want to be read. They want to make shelves buckle. They want to clutter night-tables. Every act of writing is an attempt at colonization, of making one’s essence a visible part of the landscape. Tom Wolfe, Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, Danielle Steele—do you think any one of them ever sits down to write the Great American Text File? They sit down to write big books, thick books, books that can concuss a squirrel at 20 paces, books that immediately convey the genuine physical heft of their intellect, the panoramic sweep of their imagination. Every time they complete a manuscript, they have another brick to add to the castle of their magnificence.
Even in the online era, Web natives who’ve made piles of cash publishing nothing more tangible than pixels—think Matt Drudge, think Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas—invariably leap at the chance to write an old-fashioned book, not only because of the revenue it will bring, but also because of the authority it will confer.
The world has a limited amount of space, after all, only some of which it reserves for political manifestos, romance novels and the like. Ultimately, this means that books don’t just kill trees; they kill other books, too. There is only so much ink and paper to go around. The local library can’t accommodate every highly acclaimed short-story debut (especially when there are so many great new Will Ferrell DVDs coming out).
Petty, competitive, status-conscious writers thrive on this state of affairs. Publish a 250-page novel, and you can push some other wretch’s 250-page novel off the shelves at Barnes & Noble. Publish a 750-page novel, and you can send three lesser scribes into oblivion! This constant quest for more territory inspires genius—but in the Kindleverse, the territory is endless.
Writers will still strive for prominent placement in digital bookstores, but it won’t be the same. The furious shame of going out of print will never inspire an author to work that much harder on his next effort. The merry thrill of seeing a rival’s latest collection of autobiographical essays exiled to the remainder table just three months after its release will no longer brighten the days of mid-list memoirists. A writer who goes out into the world looking for leather-bound, acid-free evidence of his genius will only see readers peering at eggshell-colored gizmos that look even less literary than those tablets UPS drivers use to capture digital signatures.
For the last six centuries, our most ambitious writers have frittered away their lives in libraries and cafes, revising, expanding, determined to make their masterpieces a little more comprehensive, a little more definitive. The light at the end of the tunnel has always been a big fat book. A hundred years from now, when the Kindle’s progeny reign supreme, the only reward for such efforts will be a file that takes an extra second or two to download. A hundred years from now, there are going to be very few long books.