The pleasures of delay
Living down in a little village in France for a couple of weeks was an instructive experience - haphazard cell phone coverage, occasional places where I could parasite someone's unprotected Internet access - basically we were 'cut off' in the modern sense of the term. A few days into the holiday, I read Jeanette Winterson's Art Objects - a book I'd taken on the off chance I might find an essay to use for the new course. Sudden awakening. From someone I'd only known about (and, I admit, been put off - the 'wrong' people recommending her etc.) she became someone I desperately wanted to read. Then the problem hit me: how to get hold of her books? Bookshops? Where? And which would stock English fiction let alone hers? Amazon? But I couldn't rely on a connection and - knowing my luck - delivery would be only after we'd left. In any case, to where? The house we were staying in doesn't, as such, have a postal address. An O'Hara state of quandariness.
Yes, I found the solution - a phone call to friends who were coming over from England and had access to good old-fashioned English internet suppliers. However, that's not the point. I experienced for several days a feeling that has all but disappeared for anyone living in the privileged 'connected' 21st Century: the sense of not having to hand. As a result, my reading - my engagement - with Winterson's writing deepened, intensified. I re-read the book that I did possess. Certain pages took on particular significance because of this very situation. I read other books I'd brought along but now subtly influenced by Winterson's writing. I started projecting what her first novel might be like. In a funny way, she'd come on holiday too. She coloured the days. When I finally had her first novel in my hands it felt different - an occasion. The book had become a different kind of object. Back home, now, and it's lost itself in amongst the many piles - and that's concerning me.
It's why the Lawrence quotation jumped out yesterday - and there are plenty more lying behind it. The point being that availability dulls. The desire for the next comes at the cost of the this. (See the past months' discussion in The Wire about music sharing - the temptation to download to the point of no longer listening. Read also Heidegger's thoughts on modern technology and the effects of storage).
Don't sell me selling
What never seems to come up in the e-book debate (or if it does it is seen as a kind of 'invisible' or 'neutral') is the necessity of an interface. The e-book relies not simply upon the hardware of the iPad, Kindle or other reader (with all the attendant anxieties of dropping/ cracking/ losing/ recharging the thing) but some kind of software and financial exchange (and the same can be said about iTunes and music). Is it so paranoid to see this as yet another calculated move of consumer society to intrude another step - a transaction - into daily life? To be able to charge you for something you'd have got directly?
Example A: I go to the bookshop and buy a book. Obviously, the book reaches the store via a network of production and delivery and I have to hand over money. However, once I've paid it's mine, in my hand. I can do what I like with it and - all things being equal - it will be on the shelf in ten, twenty, thirty years' time.
Example B: I purchase an e-book - I have to have the required hardware (itself a purchase); I have to have the required software (another purchase); I have to pay via my account (the main purchase); I have to charge up the iPad (that electricity bill). And - let's think like a marketing type for a change - what stops me then finding ways to limit your now 'unlimited' access to 'your' book? That purchase might be for only a finite period of time (a year?), for a number of reads (three?), that the software will require updating (more expense), that the add-ons and revised features will require further payment. And in ten years' time? Will that file still be readable? And so it goes.
And what about privacy issues? I walk out of the bookshop with my book in its little bag - only I (and the salesperson if they're paying attention) will know the title. Whereas, e-books - what elaborate methods of surveillance are possible - lists of purchases are but the beginning and the subsequent 'mailshots' of further suggested reading. What about which pages you've read, and how many times? And the constructions that could be placed upon this.
And let's think about the incursion into education ... Let's get them early.
You can see how this argument develops.
Look around at the number of daily activities which have necessitated some kind of sales opportunity where - before - you simply did it directly. Notice that what is trumpeted as 'convenience' and 'ease' is calculatedly set up to be able to squeeze cash out of you. And that it's not necessary to physically dig into your pocket but is transacted 'invisibly' makes it all the more clever - and dangerous.
How many of these people proclaiming the end of the book have vested interests directly or indirectly in this kind of 'wedge' effect - the seemingly transparent intrusion between 'me' and 'what I want'.** We've always been sold things but the old model was simply to make people want the lawnmower, the soap packet, the car. Now it's to find ways of making you pay to access what it is you want to buy. Clever, huh?
Until next time: try phoning a hotel direct to book a room and ask a few questions.
And of course, my next blog post will be via carrier pigeon ... I know, I know ... We're all implicated.
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* the article referred to can be read at:
** let's take it further still: not even buying but simply doing anything will soon require this kind of intervention. A 'freedom of choice' purchase option. Much as to cancel a car insurance that was no longer required I found it was normal practice to charge a cancellation fee. (So I pay for something I am no longer buying ...?)
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