Reading In The 21st Century:
The Library Goes To You

By Michael Pastore

Years ago I made a resolution with two purposes in mind: to advance my career as a writer, and to prod my self along the slippery and razor-sharp path of enlightenment. I resolved to read every day, for at least thirty minutes, and to start with the very best books. (Other reading was permitted, but only after reading at least half an hour from the great books list.) A few days after making that promise to myself, I was offered work caretaking for a house and dog in a small rural village in an isolated region in the south of France. That offer was too rare to be refused, but since there were no libraries in the area, I wondered how the job could be accepted without breaking my literary study plan.

The solution was weighty and ponderous. I packed 200 of the classics, in paperbacks, into a two large duffel bags, and set out on a bicycle with the books and camping gear piled eight-feet high, tied to the back rack of the bike. Whenever I rode on the main highways, busloads of tourists would stop and ask if they could take a photograph. Not of me ("Stand back, please, you're ruining the photo!") but of the overloaded bike.

Today, of course, the whole project would be less adventuresome and more convenient. One could travel lighter by carrying electronic literature, otherwise known as ebooks. Ebooks can be read in many ways: from files on your personal computer or laptop screen; on the World Wide Web; or on the new breed of hand-held devices such as the Rocket eBook; the Palm Connected Organizers; the SONY CLIE; and the Pocket PCs (Jornada and iPAQ) made by HP and Compaq. Ebooks can be stored on your computer as files; or slid into your computer via a diskette or CDROM; or, most fashionably these days, downloaded to your computer over the Net.

Compared to paper books, ebooks have two disadvantages. First, you need a device to read them. You need to purchase this device; learn how to use this device; maintain and repair this device; supply power to this device; protect this device from dirt and injury; and secure this device from the too-curious hands of thieves, relatives, and friends. The other disadvantage to this newfangled reading experience, is that compared to the old-fashioned paper-book way, reading ebooks can feel extremely strange. One can type for long hours on a computer screen, but something in the nature of literature makes reading from a paper-book softer, friendlier, more relaxing and more personal than reading from a computer screen.

Despite my Joy-esque fear of the misuse of computer power, and my sometimes sympathies with the neo-Luddites, it is undeniable that electronic literature offers many advantages compared to paper books, and here are six. 1) Ebooks are portable; 2) Ebooks are inexpensive to make and reproduce (thus out-of-print books can be out of print but preserved in the ebook version); 3) Ebooks are easily updated; 4) With ebooks the size of the type can be changed; 5) Ebooks are searchable: in seconds, you can locate any text in the entire book; and 6) Ebooks save paper and preserve precious trees.

With all that on the plus side, a number of critics (Jonathan Yardley, of the Washington Post is one) have been concerned that the rise of electronic books will cause the downfall of good reading. Ebook publishing is the player piano of literature. Publishing electronically is so simple and so cheap, that -- almost effortlessly -- anyone can push a few keystrokes and publish an electronic book.

O brave new world, that has such ebooks in it! Now you can pay a few dollars and download Mrs. Grumple's recipes; Aunt Fanny's family history (including the episode about Uncle Harry's glass eye which fell into a pile of marbles on a sandy beach); an 8-year-old child's essay about her summer vacation; and classic bodice-rippers such as "How I Found Rome-Ants At A Picnic In Italy." Thousands of ebooks of this type will soon be available for sale via the Web. Books which plummet from the writer's keyboard directly to the indiscriminating public without help from professional editors, or any editors at all. The opening sentence of one of these, which I found on the Web, began: "He placed his hand on her leg and moved it upward like a beast of pray." ... Although the author has invented a new genre -- the erotic-religious -- that opening gaffe discouraged me from reading more.

And yet, the ebook cornucopias are filled with fruits as well as nuts. Thanks to ebook publishing, there is now a potential antidote for the literary equivalent of the problem which a poet described as:

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste it's sweetness in the desert air."

Electronic publishing -- if it can break free from the best-seller mentality which corrupts print publishing -- electronic publishing has the potential to produce far more good than harm. Writers who would never have a chance in the slush piles of New York commercial houses, now have a fighting chance in the plush styles of epublishing. Self-publishing is now more viable than ever; and the small presses and university presses can publish economically, without perishing. One notable example, the author M.J. Rose, received well-deserved recognition when her self-published novel LIP SERVICE became the first ebook discovered online by the mainstream publishing industry. Ms. Rose's new novel, IN FIDELITY, has been released as an ebook -- November 2000 -- and will be available in paperback in January 2001. Rose writes an informative and insightful column about ebooks for Wired News. More about her writings and doings can be found on her website, at http://www.mjrose.com

The Internet, as a communications tool, excels at the work of transmitting to us everything which is sudden, changeable, fleeting, and new. Yet the Net -- and the entire nexus of electronic communications -- can also become a valuable instrument for preserving and promoting the Olde: the great works in our literary heritage. "What is a classic?" asked the essayist St. Beuve. He replied to himself: "A difficult question!" ... And for those readers who love the classic books of Western literature, it is now possible to read good books and great books in electronic format, either for free or for pennies per ebook.

The first source to offer books as electronic text was Project Gutenberg (PG): http://www.promo.net/pg/ PG is thriving, and currently offers almost 3,000 books, in the ASCII format, all free for the taking by download. Two other excellent sources for free electronic books are
The World Etext Library http://netlibrary.net/WorldHome.html
and Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) at
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/eng-on.html

But for some readers, reading ASCII on a ghost-white page is like chewing on raw tofu. If you don't like reading plain ASCII text, then you can find one of the new reader programs for ASCII, which improve the reading experience to make it look a little more (or a lot more) like a book. A number of these new readers can be found on my eformats web page:
http://www.cpsweb.com/youthtopia/eformats.htm

A new solution to the problem of finding an attractive way to read ebooks has been recently devised by John Everett, creator of Zippedbooks (http://www.zippedbooks.com). Hit on the Zippedbooks web site and you are welcomed to 27 books in a variety of categories, all of which you can download and read for free, using the Zippedbooks reader program. The typestyle is good looking, and Everett has recently added the option of viewing the book in different fonts. In fact, when I read my first Zippedbook ebook, ==Tom Brown's School Days,== I noted that the Zippedbook default font (in Goudy Old Style) was more attractive than the default font of the leading commercial ebook reader, Microsoft Reader.

Microsoft Reader gives you more bells and whistles, but Zippedbooks provides all the necessary features, including bookmarks, and the ability to search through the book. For ebook publishers, zippedbooks offers a method of making ebooks, with excellent documentation which both explains the process and teaches you about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) along the way. Everett's explanation of CSS is admirable for it's succinctness and clarity. All told, with this much e-reading and e-publishing power and ease, Zippedbooks is a contender for the title of best free ebook reader available today.

Earlier in this article I listed one of the advantages of ebooks: they are inexpensive. With the cost of hardcover and paperback books rising steadily, and the importance of making good books available to all persons, poor and middle class and rich, this cost factor is something to consider. One company which sells the classics at an affordably low price is Classic BookShelf Ltd. Their ebook on CDROM, Classic Bookshelf 2.1 (for Windows 95/98/NT) contains 200 classic books written by 46 well-known authors. For about $ 29 dollars, you're paying a mere 15 cents per book.

Obviously, selecting 200 classics from the pack is a difficult task: recall the uproar last year when Modern Library published their list of the 100 best books in the 20th Century. Yet the selection on this CD is superb. My favorite of the masters are here: Dickens, Cervantes; Flaubert; George Eliot; Thoreau; Dostoyevsky; Tolstoy; Wilde; Blake; Twain; Hans Christian Andersen. And dozens of lesser known surprises including the marvelous Five Children and It by E. Nesbitt; The Water Babies (by Charles Kingsley) and Daniel Defoe's sequel to Robinson Crusoe. (In the original book Robinson Crusoe, the hero swims out nakedly to get some food, and when he returns his pockets are stuffed with biscuits. Perhaps the sequel explains this literary miracle, or introduces us to others.)

The Classic Bookshelf reader program gives you the ability to search the book, export the text to ASCII or HTML; and claims that it can change the page and text color to more than 16 million choices -- although I not did attempt to verify that claim. One unadvertised bonus to this ebook is that a number of the books come with exceptionally insightful introductions about the author and the works. Readers can take a test read at the Classic Bookshelf web site: http://www.classicbookshelf.com

Aldous Huxley, the man who read the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover, has written:

"Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify
himself, to multiply the ways in ways in which he exists, to make
his life full, significant, and interesting."

What will happen in the future of electronic publishing? ... A difficult question! Publishing ebooks may bring us high-tech versions of those same laughably lousy bestsellers: as the Yiddish saying goes: "The same old yente except for the veil." Or ebooks may prove to be a true revolution, where everyone has access to the best books, and every individual possesses some skill to distinguish the superficial from the real.

Michael Pastore is the editor of BookLovers Review
and the author of more than ten works of fiction and non-fiction.
His essays about literature, sustainable living, humanizing
technology, and children and childhood have appeared in dozens of
print publications nationwide.

Reading In The 21st Century:The Library Goes To You

Reading In The 21st Century:
The Library Goes To You