Technology takes a page out of the Old Testament

As time goes by, I find more and more people asking me why a bibliophile and avid reader such as myself hasn’t bought a digital book reader. I’ve heard just about all the arguments – the convenience, the cost savings, the reduced environmental impact of the paper, the lower carbon emissions from not shipping books. And the more I talk about the less convinced I am that I want a Kindle, I-pad, or Sony reader.

I spent months considering picking up such a device, and even subscribed to a blog that in great detail discussed the relative merits of the different readers. Convinced the digital revolution would over take the paper book during my lifetime, I invited friends over to my house one night and asked them the take home all the books on my shelf, from 20^th century fiction to primers on the Iraq war and investigative treatises on espionage.

But I backed out of buying the device for a number of reasons, a number that rose as time went on. The first was to me the most obvious: the Kindle I buy today will within a year look like something from the first Soviet 5-year plan. This is as true in 2011 as it was in 2009 when I first looked into picking up the Kindle. And today’s shinier, lighter, prettier version is going to look ugly and clunky and out of date by the time the next version rolls around. Much like the fancy Motorola Razor phone I got when I first started working as a wire reporter, which was hip enough to attract appreciative oohs and ahhs from friends and even appear in Hollywood movies, only to draw a concomitant level of derision and chuckling when I was still using it three years later.

This particular “device churn” problem is what for me really knocks down the environmental benefit argument of the e-reader. Yes it’s true, no paper, no ink, less fossil fuel used in lugging heavy books around. But over the next ten years the average digital convert will probably own two to three e-readers, which are made with copious amounts of mercury, cadmium, chromium and lead – among the most toxic and carcinogenic substances known to human beings. Most will end up in the trash, dripping those chemicals into the water table over the next hundred years or so. A few will be recycled. Many more will be “recycled” – taken to China where women and children will boil them to extract trace elements of gold and other valuable metals, making small amounts of money great expense to their health.

I once saw a calculation that determined that the Kindle starts to lower the environmental impact of reading vs. traditional paper literature once you’ve read 70 books. I can’t say I’d be able to support or deny that estimate, but I don’t see how you compare reduced carbon emissions from fewer trees with higher rates of miscarriage and birth defects in the developing world. Apples and oranges.

Now that I’ve taken an unfortunately holier-than-thou stance on this subject, I should offer as a salvo that both my brother and sister-in-law now own Kindles, and these are two people who care more about the environment that just about anyone I’ve ever met. I don’t judge them for it or think less of them, or anyone else who might own this device or a similar one.

But (back to the soap box here) I find devices have a tendency to accumulate in a way that reminds me of one of those chapters of the Old Testament like Leviticus or Deuteronomy which is filled with phrases like “so-and-so begat so-and-so, who lived for 40 years and begat so-and-so, so-and-so, who each lived 42 years.” Devices are like this. Not only do we have to replace them every year, but we end up with more and more devices to do the same things.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who’s been knocked off his feet by his new I-pad. The thing’s amazing, he tells me, I couldn’t go back to just having a laptop. That got me curious, what does this thing do that a laptop can’t do?

You can watch movies! Uh, ok. You can have all your music on it! Right, I see. You can surf the web! Some of the web, it turns out, because reading Flash pages is still a problem because of some patent-related pissing match between Mac and Adobe. Anyway, you can probably see where I’m going with this. Granted, the guy’s got kids, his 2-year-old daughter can play games on it, he can leave them in the corner of restaurant watching cartoons, which would be awkward with a laptop.

But I general see that we’re more content to let device populations expand like Old Testament genealogies. I-pods should natural be swallowed into phones, the way handheld GPS devices are falling by the wayside in favor of Smartphones that have Google maps on them. From what I can tell people out there are still buying I-pods and Smartphones, with probably quite a few who own both.

And I find the debate about technology gets really wrapped up in the gadgets themselves and avoids a bigger question about what people end up doing with them. Specifically what most bugs me about the current era of digital readers is the digital rights management ghetto-ization that ties devices to a certain set of books. I buy the Kindle and I can’t get across the paywalls to read what’s in Sony’s digital books library. It would be a bit like a Honda driver not being able to fill up their tank a station around the corner owned by Ford. Right now I can buy used books on Amazon often for less than the digital versions. And I can’t find a lot of the random titles that I want to read in Kindle format, meaning I’d have to buy the device and buy an additional portion of books on the side.

I think the true liberation brought by the digital books revolution will let me read a book in the format I want, on the device I want, and be able to pass it along to someone else as if it were a real book. Under those circumstances I would feel justified in paying for books in digital format. Once these DRM-ghetto walls start to fall apart I think books will look a bit more like the MP3 craze of the late 1990s where people suddenly found they could get the music they want without the record companies getting away.

Until then, I think I’ve probably got more devices than I need.