The Inevitable E-Book Article

Over 1.3 million e-readers were bought, and presumably mostly gifted, over Christmas in the UK, one for every 1 in 40 people. There’s some handwringing about this, in the form of articles debating the ‘death of the book’. What is never claimed is ‘the death of the written word’, because given the multitude of forms the written word can now appear in, such a claim would be totally ridiculous. It’s not quite a direct extension of that fact to say that the book isn’t in any danger, but it seems apparent that there’s an appetite for reading, and does suggest that there will always be an appetite for long-form stories. Whether these stories continue appearing in the shape of a paper artefact called a book is debatable, but to say that long-form, (or ‘book-length’) stories will die completely is ludicrous.

So don't worry, if you even did to begin with. Given that there must be some reason people are buying them, let’s now look at the advantages of owning an e-reader. The most obvious advantage is that it saves space, shortly followed by the fact that the delivery time of an e-book, though it depends on your internet speed, is much, much quicker than either having a book posted to you, or going to a shop or library. For me, the main advantage is the number of free books that are easily accessible. Because books breed other books – like one author, and you might look for books recommended by that author, or books by similar writers. E-readers can make this process of exploration very efficient indeed, and there’s a whole lot of free, out of copyright, books to be sought out. A library in your pocket - it's the world of the future.

And so the book recommendations begin

 Let’s start with one very well-known author who, like e-readers, got a sales boost over Christmas – Charles Dickens. All of Dickens’ books are available for free, because they’re out of copyright – author’s copyright in the UK extends to the author’s lifetime and 70 years thereafter. You can, therefore, download all of Dickens’ work legally, for nothing. I chose to pay about £1.50 for a collected Dickens, with all of his novels, short stories, plays and even poems, arranged for me. I’m lazy like that.

But not in other ways.  Because once I downloaded Dickens, I quickly skipped to chapter four of David Copperfield, where the hero describes the books he had access to as a child – and these are also known to be the books Dickens himself read at that age. “Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker [all by Tobias Smollett], Tom Jones [by Henry Fielding], The Vicar of Wakefield [Oliver Goldsmith], Don Quixote [Cervantes], Gil Blas [Alain Rene le Sage], and Robinson Crusoe [Daniel Defoe], came out, a glorious host, to keep me company,” says Mr Copperfield. I quickly found that all of those are freely downloadable – my favourite is probably Tom Jones; I didn’t much care for The Vicar of Wakefield.

Oh, and if you’re planning on downloading Don Quixote, be careful. Translated fiction is a difficult proposition – the art of translation has generally improved with time, but the translations used in free downloads have to be out of copyright, and so are older, and can be poor to awful. Don Quixote is very difficult to translate, especially as Sancho Panza uses a large number of sayings with no direct English equivalent. On the other hand, a translation done by a famous author can be a great thing – witness Gil Blas, which is more easily translated because it’s largely plot driven, and can be found (with some difficulty, but it’s worth it) in translation by Scotland’s own Tobias Smollett. It’s hardly read these days, although that’s partly because it’s been hard to find. Now you can find it – which is indicative of a larger benefit of e-readers, where rare books become easily available.

More modern authors who have works out of copyright tend to be those who died youngish. F Scott Fitzgerald is one, and again, when I downloaded a collection of his work, I found that there was an article in there listing his ten favourite books, most of which are available for free download. Those were: Samuel Butler’s Note-Books, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche by H.L. Mencken, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce, Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm, The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain, Nostromo by Joseph Conrad, Vanity Fair by Thackeray, a collection of poems, Thaïs, by Anatole France, and Seventeen by Booth Tarkington – this last he calls "the funniest book I’ve ever read." Heard of it? Now you have. It wouldn’t have been impossible to find these, or other, recommendations before e-books, but the process of finding, and collecting, books has now sped up greatly. And who’s to say the accumulation of knowledge, made easier, is a bad thing?

That point made, I’m also listing all of these to provide a starting point for showing how books can breed other books. Because an interest in Dickens (whose works are all dowloadable) can lead to Smollett (also downloadable) who was a friend of Lawrence Sterne, writer of Tristram Shandy (yes, downloadable). Or, making connections more wildly, The Vicar of Wakefield can lead you to the pulp writer Robert E. Howard, of Conan the Barbarian fame, who disliked that book, and whose works are available for free or cheaply, which can then lead you on to other pulp writers who might be freely available, such as HP Lovecraft if you like horror fiction. From Dickens to Cthulhu in 3 easy steps. Fitzgerald’s recommendations include Samuel Butler’s notebooks, which can lead you to his great novels, The Way of All Flesh or Erewhon. Or, Mencken’s book on Nietzsche can lead to Mencken’s essays – I bought these in a nice collection edited by Alistair Cooke.

Other explorations can lead to fascinating curios. Looking for some science fiction, because it only seemed fitting to read some on what would once have seemed a phenomenally advanced gadget, led me to Jules Verne, all available, (translations vary, but Verne’s use of language is relatively uncomplicated, so they’re generally readable). Verne’s From The Earth to the Moon, where a giant gun is constructed to fire a spacecraft to, yes, the moon (not possible, incidentally) led to another fascinating tale, The Brick Moon by Edward Everett Hale, where a brick moon is constructed and sent into space via a flywheel (again not possible. Did you guess that?). Unfortunately some people are aboard, and somehow survive in space, because this was written in 1869. They’re then watched by telescope as they become a microcosm of Victorian society. An odd, but fascinating discovery. Which led to another such discovery, a similar retro-science fiction book, Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott. Abbott Abbott was a school teacher and once a mathematics scholar, and his book is again an examination of the Victorians, but this time using the device of a land made up of only two dimensions as a mirror on society. 

These books in turn lead to…

Well, lots of things. The point is that, used well, an e-reader can be enormous fun, as a research tool and a depository of every sort of great story, or essay, or poem, and you get the idea. It should be a freeing device, saving time and even cutting through red tape if you want to get hold of all kinds of rare items. It’s hardly the death of the book – it’s a liberating way to read them. As for books as a paper artifact, the increased enthusiasm of readers that can only be the result of e-books is probably likely to prevent such a thing happening. Unless, in the end, it just becomes too much of a chore to turn pages.