Bewitched e-Reader

I finally bought an e-Reader — the Kobo, which is Indigo/Chapter (the Canadian answer to Amazon)’s answer to Kindle. Besides acknowledging that it might be really useful on holidays, especially given that we travel with carry-ons only, I felt that I’d better get to know the way so many of my students will soon be experiencing books.

And I do like the sleek, lightweight design. You already know that I try to carry a book with me always, and with the Kobo, especially since I can have numerous want-to-reads loaded up at a time, this is easier than ever. The surface is just as readable as the pages of any book, and I can even adjust the print to a size that suits my eyes. Because I’m a fast reader, I worried at first that I’d be irritated by the micro-second hesitation of an electronic page change, but that’s turned out not to be the case. And sometimes, as when eating or knitting, the flat surface is welcome, freeing my hands to do something besides holding the book open.

BUT. . . unless there are tricks I haven’t yet learned, in this version of the eReader, at least, there are all the limitations I suspected. Several times, I’ve wanted to comparing what I’m reading with something on an earlier page, and this is much more tediously achieved than with a real book. As well, there is no way to comment in the margins — not in the Kobo as I know it — nor even to highlight and save passages. Having to carry along a separate notebook and copy out such passages negates much of the reader’s convenience, and it will direct my students away from the kind of deep-reading habits I’m hoping to instil.

Similarly, pagination (the numbering of the pages) is unstable in the eReader — a side-effect of being able to change the print size.  Once I’d copied out the quotations I wanted to save, or at least enough to let me find them again, I was stymied when I tried to note the corresponding page number: instead, I’d have to write “Chapter 18 — 1 of 20” or “Chapter 18 — 1 of 24” or “Chapter 18 — 1 of 17” — all to refer to the same quotation!

If any of my readers have e-solutions to any of these problems, I’d love to hear. Does your Reader allow you to highlight, save, and even transport quotations? Could my Kobo, if I were a better Techie? Of course, even if I learn to use the eReader more fully, it will never record for me the inestimable layers of metadata that my books can. No ticket stub from a play seen on a London stage three years ago will ever flutter from its pages, nor will it hold its author’s inked signature any more than be marked by the tea I spilled when my granddaughter bumped me. I can’t compare my current impressions with those I’d jotted on the inside cover pages the last time I prepared to teach the book and, before that, when I read it for the first time. My students will no longer marvel to see how old my copy looks, how it’s been loved like a Velveteen Rabbit, nor do they get to note that my cover has a different illustration than theirs.

What an ironic coincidence that the first book I loaded up to read on my Kobo should be Deborah Harkness’ much-hyped Discovery of Witches. Not my usual fare, but I thought this book would be a great diversion while travelling, a juicy beach book, if you will, and I wasn’t wrong. I’m not a fan of the supernatural; although I’m a huge Buffy and Angel follower, that’s due to elements beyond the thrall of vampirism. But I got the impression from several reviews that this book would hit some of the same spots as Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian did several years ago. It does, although in an even lighter register. Perfect, as I say, for airplane or beach reading. There’s a love story, family dynamics, intrigue, history, wealth, murder — all set in contemporary Oxford where a young professor divides her time between poring over books in the library and rowing a racing scull down the river. Well, except for when it moves to rural estates in France and England, beautifully described, richly furnished old homes — wonderful to be wandering through in one’s imagination when the body’s trapped in an airplane seat trying to carve a recalcitrant piece of chicken with a flimsy plastic knife.

Where’s the irony, you ask? Well, the young professor is very concerned with real books and their metadata, as are the witches, vampires, and other demons who converge at the eponymous discovery.  Those of us who love books will sigh at the libraries described, the “shush”-ing by librarians, the systems of book retrieval, the beautifully carved wooden shelves and the rolling ladders — never mind the books themselves, their illustrations, their leather or board-and-cloth covers, even their missing pages. Especially, in the case of Discovery, their missing pages. The novel gets at the rich, historied, depth of a book, the specificity of an individual copy of a particular edition. It reminds us that one copy of a book is not the same as another — a reality that may be disappearing in the levelling electronic environment of the eReader.

I’m going to keep using my Kobo, and will focus on the advantages of convenience that it offers. But I’ve got ten or twelve recently-purchased paper books to get through in the next few months as well. I hope that this transitional terrain we readers are treading now will not, eventually, mean an either/or situation which inevitably sees the analog book replaced by the digital. But I’m troubled . . . what about you? Still resisting? or are you a complete convert?