I bought an e-reader a few weeks ago, It's a Literati, made by Sharper Image. I bought it at Bed Bath & Beyond, on seventy-five percent markdown. (Is Sharper Image going out of business? Is Bed Bath & Beyond?)
It came preloaded with TWENTY-FIVE CLASSICS! “Huckleberry Finn.” “Moby-Dick.” “Pride and Prejudice.” (Not really things I hunger to reread.) And an offer for as many more public-domain classics as I want: “On the Origin of Species.” “Tom Sawyer.” (Big on Mark Twain, aren't they?) Also “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” and “Grimm's Fairy Tales,” which are more down my alley.
I can see why it was discounted. It's slow. It takes a long time to jump from chapter to chapter. The battery runs down quickly. It can't jump to familiar passages, or even to a particular page.
But I like it.
I’ve been reluctant to buy one before. I was afraid that it’d be just one more technotoy to play with and discard. Now, however, I’m sold on the concept.
I've been loading it up with free stuff from Project Gutenberg. If you don't know the site, go check it out. (Also, send them some money.) They have tons of stuff. James Joyce (Gutenberg has everything but “Finnegans Wake,” damn it). “Palgrave's Golden Treasury.” “Fathers and Sons.” “Anna Karenina.” “A Hero of Our Time.” (Russian classics rule, right?) Dryden. Dickens. L. Frank Baum. Woolf. Verlaine. Dante. Andrew Lang. Confucius, and Mencius, and the Koran, and the Apocrypha, and the Rig Veda. I’ve got almost four hundred books in it so far, and it’s barely half-full.
I still like real paper-and-ink books. I have a whole roomful of them, so evidently I must think they’re okay. But I like to travel with reading material, which (as any reader will tell you) can be pretty tedious, especially for long trips, and especially if (like me) you like to read a little of this and a little of that. The e-reader solves this problem very elegantly. I can skip from President Grant’s autobiography to the Prajna-Paramita-Hridaya Sutra to “The Phoenix and the Turtle” at my whim. It’s also ideal for bedtime, as it doesn’t weigh a ton and won’t conk me in the head if I fall asleep while reading it (as has happened more than once with Thomas Pynchon novels and forty-pound histories of the Thirty Years War).
It’s just big enough to whap someone in the back of the head with, too, just like a real book.
I am now prepared for any reading emergency.
Boswell’s life of Samuel Johnson, anyone?
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