ebooks – a superior aesthetic?

Let me whisper to you a heresy: ebooks may be aesthetically superior to paper books. There, I’ve said it. Before they come for me, to burn me as a witch, let me try to explain what I mean.

First I would like to distinguish two different functional components of the paper book: the paper book as machine and the paper book as a (complex) surface that bears text. Though it is the latter that concerns me most here, I will say the following about the former:

Ebook reading devices can not only emulate many of the page turning, indexing, book marking etc functions of the paper book, but, by being programmable, can provide us with new facilities: ebooks can be searched, linked to other texts (or images, sounds, video etc), typographically modified (to use different fonts, or to use different sized fonts – thus tailoring the reading experience to the reader), and can come to possess any number of other features thought of or unthought of to date. These ergonomic issues are, of course, aesthetic in their own right, as are the actual physical characteristics of the paper book. This latter point seems to come up time and time again especially in the context of the ‘feel and smell’ of inked paper. I am the last person to dismiss this preference. However, not only is it possible that ebook devices will come to emulate – if the desire for this should continue – the ‘feel’ and ‘look’ of paper, but I would suggest that the ebook can bring its own feel and look to the reading experience; the slickness of metal and glass and all manner of textured plastics, and who knows what other materials. These particular aesthetic aspects of physicality will, no doubt, long continue to be a bone of contention – at least for those of us who have grown up with paper books.

Setting aside these considerations, I would like to turn to the second of my functional components: the book as a surface that bears text. This surface in paper books (and in scrolls, tablets and other devices that preceded the codex) is, after all, the one that most matters; it is that through which we actually ‘read’ the book. I would suggest that it is this surface that constitutes the primary aesthetic of any book (second only to its content). In the West (and I believe this carries through to other orthographies, printed or otherwise) the locus of this aesthetic lies in the laying out on the surface of crisp black characters in lines and in paragraph blocks, culminating in a macro-block, consisting of these components, that forms a ‘page’. It is thus the page that is central (everything else is merely a means of moving from one page to another). And it seems to me that there are two aesthetics that dominate the page: the quality of the print and the orthogonality of all the elements on a page.

Print by its very nature privileges repetition over individual uniqueness. For centuries scribes struggled manually to make each example of a given character identical to every other. With the advent of printing this became just about possible. I believe that the ebook represents the culmination of this process… for even printed books suffer from variations in ink density across a page and, because paper is an organic substrate, the kerning between printed characters can vary. Ebooks, by contrast, supply us with text that is of a perfectly uniform density and with precise, invariable kerning.

Similarly, the orthogonality of the macro-block of text on an ebook page is also invariable, whereas its paper counterpart is not. However, there is, I feel, a more important difference in the orthogonality (the perils of orthogonality are another matter: refer to “orthogonality” tag) of the macro-block: the gutter of a paper book. We are so accustomed to this that we hardly notice it, however, it is for many of us a cause of some irritation. It seems to me that, with all the advantages gained in the move from scroll to codex, there came also a major disadvantage: the gutter that was introduced by the need to attach the pages to the spine. Of course, in expensive books, hardcover rather than paperback (or even worse, those that are perfect bound), the way a page slopes down into a gutter is somewhat ameliorated – not only because the superior binding allows the book to lie flatter when open, but also because the macro-block is often kept away from the gutter by a wider margin. Paperbacks are altogether a different matter, with sometimes a reader being forced to peer down into the gutter into which the text seems to be slipping. In this sort of book the reader almost has to pull it apart to read it; perfect bound books literally come apart, so that the cover ends up as a folder holding a sheaf of loose pages.

The reader of an ebook is spared all of these misfortunes. Each page is presented perfectly flat and square and with no danger of being lost or of any damage coming to the device from the attempt to read what it displays.

So – I’ve not got long now before they come for me – though ebooks may be extremely disruptive to us readers, and though some things may be lost, I feel that, on balance, ebooks are destined to provide us with an aesthetically (never mind functionally) superior reading experience…

Posted by Ricardo

writer and blogger

10 Replies to “ebooks – a superior aesthetic?”

  1. Using a Kindle was initially an adjustment, but I’ve come to love it! I’m wondering though why all three novels aren’t available for Kindle in the US like they are in the UK??

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    1. They should be! My agent and publishers told me that they were… Are any of the books available on the kindle?

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      1. On Amazon.com no … as a matter of fact, the site asks customers to click a link to request that they be made available for Kindle. But all three are available at Amazon.co.uk .. of course you can’t buy them there from the US 🙂

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        1. This is most tedious news… I will just have to hassle my publishers again… But nothing may get done until I return from Iran. Thanks for bringing this to my attention Tom

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          1. No problem … and if you give me your publisher’s personal cell numbers I can harass them for you LOL

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  2. I’d like to think of the eBook as another choice of reading medium, but hardly a replacement.

    For one thing, I like seeing all the books on my shelf. They take up physical space that somehow relates to the intellectual space they’ve created for us. I like carrying the weight of my books around – they’re heavy, but I think that weight is worthwhile and it makes you truly consider what is worth carrying to begin with.

    Another features that the eBook likely will come up with one day is highlighting and note-taking on the side. I used to like my books perfect until I went to university and discovered that if I kept my books perfect I’d never remember which lines/pages I really wanted to go back to. As a result, I like the physical experience of marking the page – and even the technical skill of learning how to underline and highlight in a neat and straight way that an eBook wouldn’t ever teach you because it’s automatic. I like the effort of having stickies, and taking the time to space them, or choose colours.

    Having said all that, I wouldn’t mind a reader if someone gave it to me – it’s pretty useful for travelling since I go through novels especially quickly while on the road. I still prefer getting my physical book – with all its imperfections (i.e. the spine) – and protecting it (i.e. it’s my job not to get coffee spilt on it).

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    1. I suspect it will be replacement for paperbacks… and that hardbacks will live on… And it will be more prevalent in some areas than others…
      I imagine that many of us will collect paper books of texts that are particularly special to us – and these books are likely to be more beautiful than at present – and they will, by their smaller numbers and finer finish actually be an enhancement on what we have now…

      Annotation will be one of the main advantages of ebooks. I have gone through the same transition – from perfect book, to writing on it. With an ebook we can share annotations… and can cross link annotations – the possibilities will be far more interesting than we suspect…

      The key issue seems to me to be that we’ve all grown up with paper books – and that some of the profundity we found in them rubbed off on the paper of those books. Of course, they probably do have a beauty that even someone new to the paper book would be aware of. Nevertheless, I feel that what most people feel about this issue is something akin to fetishising the objects…

      Ultimately, what matters is surely the text itself, not the means by which it is conveyed…

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  3. Thank you for this! Finally some sense! 😀

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  4. I enjoyed The Chosen on our boat, not sure how suitable an ebook would have been. I love the touch and the smell of the book and when it sits in my bookshelf it brings back great memories, not just of your amazing story but also where I enjoyed it the first time. But in order to make a living you must make sure you provide your books in any shape or form, as the reader desires. Embrace the digi age. xx

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