A paperback is still my favorite medium for reading. Don’t care for cloth books because I’m a reader, not a collector. Don’t like trade paper because those were made oversized just to jack up the price, and they can’t slide into a pocket. But while I do not own an e-reader yet, I can’t say I have any major problem with them. Jonathan Franzen, however, does. From Anita Singh’s Telegraph piece about Franzen’s criticism of e-books:
“The author of Freedom and The Corrections, regarded as one of America’s greatest living novelists, said consumers had been conned into thinking that they need the latest technology.
‘The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,’ said Franzen, who famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing.
‘I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.'”
Tags: Anita Singh, Jonathan Franzen