Overdrive. The application that has helped me enjoy ebooks and added fuel to my angst about our future.
I had experimented with the ebook lending option that the local public library provided a while back. The selection was disappointing, what was there was mostly checked out, the ebook lending website sucked and the formats of the books were mostly audio (DRM’d WMA) or Mobibook or Adobe PDF, all unsupported on the iPhone. There was a single piece of software that allowed me to read the ebooks, called BlueFire, but that crashed my jailbroken iPhone everytime I tried using it. So, I gave up.

In the aftermath of my piece on ebooks, I went back to the ebook website to try again. What mostly drove me back was the ease of ebooks, that I didn’t have to carry a stack of books with me. Furthermore, with the few ebooks I had tried (mostly in the public domain), I could cut and paste text that I found interesting and this appealed to my note taking. Today, whenever I run across a passage in a book that I like, I stop reading, look for a computer or the iPhone to copy the passage, tediously type the passage into Evernote (the application I use to store all my notes), decide what the appropriate tags are for the passage and save it. All of this interferes so badly with the flow of reading that I scarcely do it. Since most of my books are borrowed from the local library, this means I have to scramble to copy the passages as the deadline for the lending approaches. This includes trying to remember the location of the passages and the same laborious process described before. Given my copious free time, this means that most passages end up not being noted. With ebooks, I hoped this would end, that I could finally note passages that I cared about in my notebook quite easily. But I didn’t want to support ebooks for all the reasons that I spoke about earlier. If I could borrow ebooks from my local public library, that would change some of these objections.

When I visited the Northern California Digital Library website this time, I found more books were available and importantly, the books were all in formats that were readable on an iPhone. After some searching, I found a few well regarded books such as Pulitzer Prize winning Olivia Kitteridge. The download and read process was quite straightforward. Once I was done selecting the book, I had to login with my public library ID and the book would be ready for download. Clicking on the download link on the iPhone launched a program called Overdrive that downloaded the book. That’s it, the book was ready for reading.

I picked fiction because I was still on a fiction drive and hoped that having an easy to read book by the bedside would help me get to sleep sooner. I’ve always enjoyed reading in bed, but sadly the habit ended after my marriage. Shanthala is sensitive to light when she’s sleeping and even a simple reading light would wake her. So, I was stuck with reading outside the bedroom. The toilet became my favorite place to read. The seating was comfortable and two tasks got accomplished at the same time. With the ebook and the iPhone, I hoped that I could resume my old favorite, reading in bed. The Kindle would not have been a help in this regard because the display technology used in Kindle (and most other dedicated ereaders) is great for battery life and reading in bright sunlight, but doesn’t work in the dark. Most ebook readers on the iPhone came with a night mode wherein the usual bright white background was replaced with a dark one cutting down on the glare.

The small form factor of the iPhone took some initial getting used to. I had been doing quite a bit of reading on the iPhone before, and so the setup time was minimal, but even today, I’m a little daunted when I see the number of pages a book is (frequently over a 1000) on the iPhone. But changing the form factor didn’t change how difficult I find liking most books, Pulitzer Prize winning or not. Shanthala and I had a fight a long time ago, when we were still in college. I had fallen in love with Isaac Asimov and she with Arthur C Clarke. I had finished reading Foundation’s Edge and she 2010: Odyssey Two. We were arguing about which author was better, or rather I was. She mostly stopped with who she likes. I used to go on about who she ought to like and like more. I told her how the book I liked had won a Hugo award. Her comeback: “So ?”. It stunned me. How could she stand in opposition to the declaration of the top critics in the world about which book was better. The book I liked had beaten the book she liked for an award. She needed to make a stronger case. I couldn’t get that about her. She rested her case on that one word and I went home stewing about it. When I calmed down enough, I figured why that was such a strong word. I still liked Foundation’s Edge better, but I stopped caring for what others thought about a book.

After starting and discarding a couple of books, I finally settled on a book called Butterfly’s Child by Angela Davis-Gardner. The story grabbed me. A mother kills herself so that her illegitimate child can go with his father and make a better life in a foreign land. As an immigrant, I’ve often thought about how much of myself I identified with the culture I was born into. Reading the book, I realized that the answer depends also on how much you differ from the rest of the populace and how much of that difference is based solely on your appearance. Based on the aftermath of the famous opera, Madame Butterfly, I found the work strangely affecting. I liked learning a little more about how the world worked in those days. The story itself was well done, the characters appealing and the ending quite clever. When I finished it, 1200 or so pages later, I had finished my first ebook and had downloaded a few more ebooks from the website.

Ease. If one word sums up why this is the second time I’m devoting so much time to write about ebooks, it would be ease. Ease in transporting the books. On our recent vacation to New Hampshire, I went with a single book and that book was about scenic driving in New Hampshire. All the books I was reading or wanted to read were on my iPhone. Shanthala carried two books with her, but she always traveled light. Ease in accessing a book. I can also login to the library anytime, anywhere and find a book I want to read. I no longer have to wait for the library to open or even go there to get a book. Ease of returning a book. I no longer have to scramble to return books on time to avoid fees. Once the lending period is over, the books are automatically inaccessible.

The website of Northern California Digital Library is not pretty or functional beyond the basics. The genres are quite limited. For example, fiction is limited to: Juvenile, Literature, Mystery & Suspense, Romance, Science Fiction & Fantasy and Young Adult Fiction. Most of the great works in fiction are clumped under Literature. Similarly, non-fiction is restricted to: Biography & Autobiography, Business & Careers, Foreign Language Study, Health & Self-Improvement, History and Religion & Spirituality. I didn’t read most works in those pre-defined categories and was therefore stuck with browsing through all of “All Non-Fiction”, wading through a lot of pages to find something interesting. The website seems more designed for finding exactly what you’re looking for rather than serendipitous finds.

One of the chief reasons why I disliked ebooks, the absence of a single, open format, is very visible here. Most older books were audio only or had a Mobibook version. Among the newer books, the list was almost uniformly distributed amongst the Adobe EPUB format and the Adobe PDF format. The latter format couldn’t be downloaded to the iPhone as easily as the EPUB version and even when you managed it, the applications to read such a book crash on a jailbroken iPhone. Kindle support just recently began, but it was geared towards supporting Kindle devices rather than the app on the iPhone (or Android). This means that to download a Kindle book to its iPhone reader, you have to use a desktop (or laptop) browser; the mobile version of Amazon doesn’t support downloading the book to the iPhone. How does a library decide which version to support and do they have to pay for both (most likely) ? The format wars have recently resulted in Barnes & Noble pulling books from a specific publisher off its shelves to protest an exclusive agreement reached by that publisher with Amazon’s Kindle.

I had hoped that with ebooks, I could make notes far more easily. That turned out to be false as well, especially with the books borrowed from the library. I cannot cut and paste passages! The DRM on the ebooks makes it impossible to do so. What are the publishers afraid of? That people will cut and paste whole works piece by piece? The only advantage is that I can bookmark the pages with the interesting passages and then visit those pages when I want to type up the passages.

I worry about is the continuing disappearance of public places and with that our physical connection to one another. Borders closed their stores a few weeks back. There was one a couple of miles from where we live. I didn’t go there because they were a large corporate store and instead visited independent bookstores and those selling used ones. But, it was a place to meet and spend time for many people and they’re slowly vanishing. The TV drove everybody indoors, leaving the sidewalks deserted and lifeless. Cable and now Netflix has driven people away from movie halls. Facebook and other social media are driving us away from seeking physical connection with each other. And ebooks may eventually lead us to abandon public libraries as places to meet and be around people. When Asimov wrote about future societies in which people cloistered themselves in their homes and rarely got in physical proximity with others, I wondered how we would get to such a place. Now I know. Ironically, a wonderful book about all this called “Alone Together: How We’ve Come to Accept More From Technology and Less From Each Other” was one I found as an ebook on the public library site. It was also the only book I purchased at the closeout sale of the Borders’ bookstore. Life is ironical, in nuanced ways.

I also worry about what the effect is on Maya of my spending so much time in front of a screen, and a small screen at that. Will she understand that I can do many things with the device and that what I’m doing is reading books, something which I did a lot of before too. I worry about the harmful effects of spending so much time with a cell phone. How much of the studies conducted so far take into account the enormous amounts of time we all seem to spend with them now. Already studies have started to emerge talking about some observed effects of the cell phone, inconclusive though they maybe for now. What about the effect of such more glare on my eyes.

Of course, for every complaint in this entry, I can sing paeans to the benefits of all this, including that people like me have some audience (imaginary for all I know) for my writing. So, I’m not advocating a return to some imagined wonderful past. But I wonder how do we keep our physical connections alive in the presence of so much ease in abandoning it. Consider the effects of our abstraction of food. We’ve allowed industrial farming to strip mine our lands and turn tasty, luscious tomatoes into perfect looking, watery, tasteless red blobs. So many of us don’t know where our food comes from or why it is so much cheaper to buy food grown halfway around the world than in our own backyards. So many of us don’t stop to consider the consequences of our unquenchable thirst for cherries in winter and apples in summer. Stripped of the connection to land, we make choices the consequences of which we scarcely understand and fuel global warming and unjust wars. What are the consequences of the loss of public spaces ? Will ebooks lead to such loss ?

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1. The Trouble With EBooks