Getting a Good Read on Electronic Books

Harold Bloom, one of America’s most prominent literary critics, minces no words on the rise of electronic books.

“I regard all this as one more horrible disaster,” Bloom said. “I hope it sinks without a trace.”

Not without a well-financed fight. This month marks the splashy debut of three digital reading devices, the fancy name for electronic books. Although hand-held, battery-powered units that flip pages at the press of a button have been around for two years, the devices may finally have evolved to the point of being readable enough and cheap enough to attract a wider audience.

Each of the new units can hold several books at once--downloaded via the Internet for a fee generally lower than the price of buying them bound.

Two models in particular--both marketed under the RCA name--boast major improvements in screen technology and ergonomics over previous readers.

“They cross the threshold of what is required to enjoy reading on a device,” said James Sachs, chief executive of Softbook Press, the Silicon Valley company that designed one of the readers.

But the fundamental question remains: How many people will find digital readers more convenient, portable or useful than books, perhaps the most convenient, portable and useful invention of all time? As one of the most sacred artifacts of civilization, books could prove to be one of the last frontiers of the digital age. Bloom, who believes that the computer has hurt serious reading in general, believes that e-books would be a major step backward.

“Imagine that for the last 500 years we had nothing but e-books, and then there was some great technological advance that brought us the printed and bound book,” Bloom said. “We would all be ecstatic. We would be celebrating after the long horror of the e-book.”

Unlike Bloom, some literary figures embrace the e-book--at least for certain kinds of reading.

“The notion of having one book when I travel, with everything I need downloaded on it, would be unbelievable,” said author Anne Fadiman, whose father, Clifton, brought his love of books and literature to post-World War II America through appearances on radio and television. “Similarly for students, even in grade school,” she said. “My daughter is in the sixth grade, and her books are so heavy that she uses a backpack on wheels.”

In fact, Fadiman’s daughter is just the kind of reader--growing up at a time when reading off an electronic screen is not a novelty--who might be more accepting of an e-book. But Fadiman, whose own essays on books are collected in the highly praised tome “Ex Libris,” fears the acceptance might go too far.

“I am frightened of e-books, because I am worried they will eventually displace books,” she said. “The whole tactile, sensory, individual aspects of printed books would disappear. The thickness of the pages, how they are cut, the binding, type of paper, design, typeface--they’re all part of the experience.

“The e-book as an addition to our lives is something I’m 100% for. As a replacement, I’m 100% against.”

Sachs, who co-designed the Macintosh computer mouse and later developed the popular animated toy Teddy Ruxpin, tried to mollify the fears of book lovers. “We are not in a war with books; books are not going to go away,” he said at a recent Washington conference.

At the end of his talk, he briefly held up the two most eagerly anticipated readers, the REB1100 and REB1200 (the “R” stands for RCA and the “EB” for e-book). After several minutes of passing the machines back and forth, a small group that got to try them clearly favored the lighter, cheaper, black-and-white 1100, which will retail for about $299.

The reader is the direct descendant of the Rocket e-book, which was put out in 1998 by NovuMedia, which has since been absorbed by multimedia giant Gemstar. It weighs in at 1 pound, 2 ounces--about half a pound less than the Rocket--and has a much surer, rubberized grip that allows for easy one-handed use.

Its sharp, backlighted screen measures 5 1/2 inches diagonally, which is smaller than a mass-market paperback page, but the size of the type on the reader can be adjusted. This was appreciated by several in the crowd. “I boost [the type size] up and these middle-aged eyes can read it with no problem,” said Stephen Cole, 47, an Australian entrepreneur.

The typeface used is always the same, whether the book is “War and Peace” or Stephen King’s latest. Fadiman, who once saw a Rocket e-book on display in a bookstore but didn’t wait in line to try it, was not crazy about the single typeface.

“That’s part of the character of a book, part of the effect,” she said.

The 1100’s memory of 8mb is enough to hold about 8,000 black-and-white pages, or about 25 good-size novels. And the rechargeable battery can last for 20 to 40 hours, depending on how bright it’s kept, according to RCA.

The 1200 is the larger, color model, but that comes at a much higher price: $699.

The weight of the 1200 is 2 pounds, 1 ounce--about double the 1100 but still lighter than the latest Harry Potter book, which tips the scales at 2 1/2 pounds. The screen is 8.2 inches diagonally and the battery will last for five to 10 hours.

Although the screen displays color graphics and pictures with clarity, black-and-white text is not nearly as sharp as on the 1100.

The supplier of books for both the 1100 and 1200 will be Gemstar’s own bookselling operation, reached directly by plugging the devices’ modems directly into phone jacks.

Thousands of Titles

Books for the devices will be available on the Web at Barnes & Noble (https://www.bn.com) or Powell’s Books (https://www.powells.com), both of which have special e-book sections that will offer thousands of titles for the RCA models. After the order is made and the customer’s code number entered, the book will automatically be downloaded the next time the device’s modem hooks up with Gemstar.

Pricing of the electronic books has not been finalized, according to Gemstar officials, but most newly released hardbacks will sell for about the same in either traditional or electronic formats. The major exception is hardbacks from Time Warner Trade Publishing (including Warner Books and Little, Brown and Co.), which will mostly sell for a set price of $14.95 in electronic versions.

That’s a savings of $6.56 compared with the hardback price of the upcoming James Patterson crime novel, “Roses Are Red,” for example.

Don’t expect to find much serious literature for the RCA model, at least not at first. A search for books by Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison and Saul Bellow came up empty. The only hit on “Hemingway” was Collins Hemingway, co-author of the Bill Gates book “Business at the Speed of Thought.”

The third reader on display was the eBookMan from Franklin Electronic Publishers, which for several years has put out small electronic readers holding specific books such as the Bible. The eBookMan, which will be available in three configurations at different price levels ($129, $179 and $249), looks similar to a personal organizer such as a Palm, and can download and play audio books.

The eBookMan is thin and, at 7 ounces, by far the lightest of the three readers coming out in November. But its 4 3/8-inch screen presents the most formidable challenge to reading.

Owners of the eBookMan will be able to buy, from a variety of online retailers, only those books that have been put in the Microsoft Reader format. Prices vary considerably. One of the current best-sellers in that format is Jackie Collins’ “Lethal Seduction,” available at https://www.bn.com for $1. The hard-bound version of the book on the same site goes for $20.80, and it’s not yet available in paperback.

Robert Ludlum’s “The Hades Factor” costs $15.95 to download in Reader format, which is a bargain compared with the $24.76 price for a hardback. But a paperback of the book is available on the site for $14.35.

One of the institutions bound to feel the major effects of e-books is libraries. At the conference, Qihao Miao, deputy director of the Shanghai Library, joked that the industry leaders on one of his panels “are the beneficiaries of the e-book.

“On the contrary,” he said, “I am the potential victim.”

He worried that many parts of the world will not share in the digital book revolution--if it comes at all. “If people do not have enough money to buy a book,” Miao said, “I don’t think they will be able to buy an electronic book.”

In this country, some libraries have already begun to experiment with lending e-books loaded with titles. The main library in Charlotte, N.C., has 10 Rocket e-books it lends for two weeks at a time. “It’s mostly popular titles--’Angela’s Ashes,’ ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’--in fiction, and nonfiction like ‘The Greatest Generation,’ ” said the coordinator of the project, Robin Bryan.

“The public has been very pleased with [e-books],” Bryan said. “Some people say they don’t think they would ever like such a thing, but if they try it, they get used to it. Some want to renew it.”

And Bryan sees electronic collections, especially of public domain classics, as being a particular advantage for small libraries.

‘A Return to the Scroll’

This particularly worries Bloom, who has spent a lifetime championing the detailed, thoughtful reading of the classics. “One of the major advances in the history of Western culture was when we went from the handwritten scroll to what was called a codex, a printed page that was bound,” he said. “The e-book is a return to the scroll, a return of just holding one page at a time in your hands.

“The screen is a scroll.”

As for the enhancements e-books offer, such as a search function, Bloom thinks they are more dangerous than useful. “Thinking is dependent on memory, and if you have to rely on some kind of device to do all your remembering for you, your memory will go bare. You will not be able to think clearly and well.”

Finally, he argued that the only truly deep reading comes out of a personal, intimate relationship with a book.

“You can never be really alone with an e-book,” Bloom said. “The technology--a downloading device, buttons, power source--takes away from the internal process of reading.

“If you are in search of information, go ahead and get an e-book. If you want to drown yourself in information, there is the Internet.

“But if you are longing for wisdom, you need a real book.”