Everything, Everywhere, All the Time

I read Kottke a lot (as you know) and occasionally, when Mr. K needs a break from the site, Tim Carmody will occasionally fill in for him (does someone doing something twice constitute them doing it “occasionally”? if not, then fill in your own more appropriate term there).  Over on Tim’s Twitter feed and also on the Kottke site there’s an ongoing conversation about a hypothetical system (which Tim posited) that would either A) allow you to instantly get access to any book currently available in a digital format, on any device, at any time, all for a monthly fee of anywhere from $25-$100 or B) allow you to instantly access a rotating selection of digital books on certain devices (though, multiple devices certainly) à la Netflix (except, obviously, for books instead of movies).

Here’s my only problem with something like this: At best – and largely with the help of my smart phone and a couple of reader aps, by the by – I get through about 4 books a month these days.  At worst, it’s about 2, but it hasn’t been less than that for a few months now.  In my hey-day as an grad student studying English Lit, I was getting through between 2-4 a week, for a total of roughly 8-10 a month.  It’s frightening to think that for two years I was reading about 100+ books a year (adding to the mix stuff I read for pleasure outside of school bounds). At any rate, as someone whose main hobby is reading – and it’s a hobby only right now – I like the idea of this, but realistically I don’t think I’d be its target audience.  In other words, I read more than almost anyone I know (at least, anyone who isn’t in school), but even I don’t think I can conceivable read enough in a month to make this service worth the money, for me anyway.

The vertiginousness of the concept is, I believe, what appeals to Tim and to the other people who are into the concept and willing to pay through the nose (if it existed).  If I was going to continue my career as an academic or a literary researcher of any kind, I can also see where it might be incredibly useful. As at least one commenter on the Kottke article has pointed out, libraries (specifically, I think, the inter-library loan system) can serve the same function as a service like the one Tim is proposing, but for free.  In many ways, too, inter-library loan is superior, since I and most other people used it to access obscure and out-of-print titles that largely couldn’t be had in the local bookstore or on Amazon; which is to say, they couldn’t be had without paying down a a couple hundred bucks, which most grad students don’t have just lying around.  I mean, that’s good booze money right there (I kid, I had no money for drinks for those two years… thank god for friends who will bring beer to your house and leave it there when they go!).

To get back to the point, however, the problem is that sometimes you have to wait for a book to come from somewhere like Australia, or Germany, or somewhere else that’s damn far away.  If you’re a writer on a deadline (school or otherwise) and you really want to check out a book, it could make you sweat a little to be waiting for a last-minute inter-library loan to come in, especially when you don’t even know if this book is going to have anything useful to contribute to what you’re researching/writing!  I’ve had so many tantalizing books come to me from Canada, California, England, etc. that turn out to be total duds.  With a book that’s been converted into a digital format anyway, and with a service like this, you could download it, peruse it, and either grab what you need or move on to something else, all within minutes or – at most – hours, rather than days.  I would have adored this in grad school.

Now? I can wait.  I don’t have deadlines for reading.  I can be patient. What’s more, I accepted a long time ago that there isn’t going to be enough time in my life for me to read everything, so I can relax and pick from what I find before me.  I almost exclusively buy used books, and have found it futile to seek for a specific book always. Instead, I keep an ever evolving “wish list” and either write down the list or try to keep part of it in my head when I go on the rare book shopping trip.  Usually, I end up finding none of them, and instead getting something else entirely that I hadn’t been wanting to find.  With digital books, I’ve almost exclusively been reading books that have been out of copyright for years, and are therefore available free on the Kindle store or Project Gutenberg or another service like it.  I’ve now read about 15 books this way, and I have about 10 more in my queue that I’ve downloaded and am working through.  I can’t afford to buy that many books right now (and have way too many sitting on my shelf that I need to read before I do buy more), but the amount of novels out of copyright right now are staggering.  It’s been a great education in Victorian literature.  Why do I need to pay for I do have a Netflix account, but copyright with movies works very differently, as of course the advent of movies is far more recent than that of books.  So, there is no equivalent for books right now, but do casual readers like me really need one?  I’d argue that it heavily depends on what your interests are.

The really big positive thing I can see coming out of something like this is that it might result in a bigger push for getting more and more obscure books digitized.  Project Gutenberg and related projects are doing a great job of this with volunteer labor, but having a company with money to pay people to do that same work would probably step up the rate at which we’re getting books into digital formats.  Also, at the moment, they can only do books out of copyright (meaning, wicked old ones!). While I don’t have time to read every book, I do think it’s an admirable goal to make every book available to be read by someone out there. After all, there are probably very few books out there that no one, no where, no when would want to read.  The option should be available going forward, rather than having books get lost and tossed, never to be read from again.