Impulse

I love books. No, noth­ing so abstract as to include a PDF. I’m talk­ing about a good old fash­ioned hunk of pressed wood I can hold in my hand, thumb through, or drop on the table with a sat­is­fy­ing thud.

I’ve tried the ebook thing. I attempted read­ing Alice in Wonderland on a Palm, but never got very far. The same was true of Cory Doctorow’s online books which I tried both via PDF and via the new daily RSS feed. I just can’t get into them. Online, I have an atten­tion span of about 5 para­graphs. After that, the text becomes dry and ster­ile, no mat­ter how good the writ­ing (and Cory’s writ­ing is quite good). It’s just not as good as a hard-copy.
It’s not the medium, but what you can do with it: You can curl up on the couch with a book. You can read in bed for hours with­out get­ting entan­gled in power cords. You can read them sit­ting upside-down on a big poofy chair (yes, I still do this even though it’s been sev­eral decades since I was 10). The last time I tried that with an ebook, my arms got so sore pre­vent­ing the lap­top from crash­ing down on my head that I couldn’t type for days.
Little bitty devices like Palms & cell phones are no help — how can you cheat & read ahead in a sus­pense­ful scene (admit it, you do it too) when the screen only holds two sen­tences? Don’t even try to read a screen­play on one of these — the refor­mat­ting will leave you lost in a desert of white­space with oases of dia­log.
There are, how­ever, dis­ad­van­tages to the wood pulp for­mat: they’re bloody heavy — I had to pay €80 extra to return from a two month tour of europe because I had amassed 18 books in my lug­gage. More frus­trat­ingly, books are com­pletely unsearch­able. I have been com­pletely spoiled by google & grep: I expect my search results in sec­onds. Thumbing through pages in a book, search­ing for a phrase is now intol­er­a­ble. If I can’t find a phrase in a few sec­onds, I get so frus­trated that I want to throw the book at some­thing (another sat­is­fy­ing advan­tage of that medium, btw). I’ve actu­ally caught myself flip­ping through a book won­der­ing where they put the search-box.
I want the books of Neil Stephenson’s Diamond Age — a book that looks like a book, feels like a book, smells like a book, but can down­load new con­tent and is com­pletely search­able.
Enough com­men­tary for now. Tune in tomor­row for another install­ment of Cool Art. After that, the post I intended to write tonight, assum­ing I can find that bloody Terry Gilliam quote I just spent hours search­ing for. (Ok, it was only one minute, but it seemed like hours).