Where will all the books go? A version of that question has occupied commentary
about Amazon’s Kindle since news of its release first made its way to public
attention in September 2007. Posed out of curiosity, excitement, as well as
trepidation, the question includes anxiety about the re-invention of reading
embodied by new features and the intricacies of downloading policy. In this
essay, I focus on disappearance for the ways in which it indexes concerns about
the Kindle’s material impact on reading. Tracking these concerns, I turn to
three major moments in the Kindle’s biography in order to
emphasize Amazon’s investment in mimicking the transcendence associated with
reading and the ways in which this investment is met, and at times exceeded, by
readerly desires to possess that transcendence. That the very name Kindle
should occasion parallels between e-reading and book burning, that Jeff Bezos
should claim unobtrusiveness as the device’s exemplary feature, and that
Amazon’s unannounced deletions of Orwell’s
1984
from thousands of Kindle libraries should meet with such ire, makes visible the
two ideologies of reading — on the one hand, the invaluable (because ephemeral)
force of reading and on the other, reading as a relation of ownership and agency
— that stand in both an uneasy and profitable tension for Amazon and its
reader-consumers.
Where will all the books go? The reinvention of reading.
Kindling, Disappearing, Reading
Within two weeks of the Kindle’s public release in the fall of 2007 a rather
telling fantasy had begun to emerge. In this fantasy, one that cohered out of
book industry and tech blogs, media features, interviews, and articles on-line
and in print, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, arrives one weekday
afternoon to Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo studios for a surprise guest appearance on
her show. To an audience of attentive Oprah devotees, Bezos speaks about the
Kindle, describing it as a portable service that, thanks to its ability to
connect with Amazon.com, will change the face of reading by making it more
accessible, even more enjoyable to even more readers. As Winfrey looks on
approvingly, Bezos asserts that this
is the most important thing we’ve ever done. It’s so ambitious to take
something as highly evolved as the book and improve on it. And maybe even
change the way people read
. With a significant glance at the talk show host,
Bezos then takes a breath and announces that for a limited time, Oprah viewers who buy a
Kindle from Amazon will get digital copies of all future Book Club books
delivered directly to their device for free
. The Oprah audience — accustomed to corporate
promotions as well as pronouncements about the incalculable value of reading —
cheers, and the camera pans wide to take in and broadcast their glee at the
prospect of reading made so spectacular.
As phantasmatic as it was premature, this scenario was striking on various
counts, not the least of which was its imagination of a marriage made in media
heaven, a union of two moguls already iconic in book culture. There was, then, a
sense of the inevitable realized when a year later (in October of 2008), Oprah
announced on-air and on-line that the Kindle was absolutely my new favorite thing in the
world
. Not unlike those who touted the Kindle on
Amazon’s website, Oprah insisted that using the Kindle had changed the way she
read and enhanced her love of reading. As Ted Striphas notes at the
beginning of The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and
the Right to Read, this was a love affair
Oprah could
celebrate with her audience. See Communication and
Critical/Cultural Studies 7:3 (September 2010). As she
implied later in a video testimonial on Amazon’s website, the Kindle was life-changing
because it
enabled all the more her capacity for reading. The efficacy of her endorsement
was especially salient at that moment, for Oprah the reader stood at the
crossroads defining much of the talk about Amazon’s first made product. The
bibliophilic Oprah who prizes and collects first editions for their rarity,
regarding them as material treasures, is, after all, also the Oprah who views
reading as a spiritual and democratizing vocation, who has translated that sense
into a book club that is as much a multi-media phenomenon as anything else. Yet
the speculation following her endorsement suggested that even an alliance with
Oprah, the unquestioned
Queen of Reading in
America, might not win the battle for the Kindle. Indeed by the time
Oprah brought the device to the attention of her viewers, the public debate over
the Kindle and its impact on contemporary reading practices was already in full
swing. To what extent would the Kindle replace the book? What is a Kindle book,
and how does one read it? Where would books go in the wake of the Kindle? For
Oprah to confer on the Kindle her particular readerly and literary authority was
to allay some of these anxieties. For Oprah to tout the Kindle was not only to
position the device in the mainstream, but also to foreground that
Kindle-reading would simultaneously maintain and depart from the experience of
book reading.
That simultaneity, and Oprah’s embrace of it, functioned to reassure and excite
her viewers with an account of reading as fresh as it was familiar. In this
essay, I contend that Amazon’s construction of reading is similarly nostalgic
and forward-looking, and that understanding this construction marks a crucial
step in accounting for the Kindle’s reception. The seamlessness Amazon
attributes to Kindle-reading depends, I argue, on a careful ideological
suturing. To perform this suturing, Amazon in design and discourse insists that
the Kindle’s innovations enhance reading without altering its long familiar
nature. In this balancing act the symbolic resonance of print reading tempers
the sensibility that the digital will remake reading. My point is not to judge
the success of the Kindle, to lament its shortcomings or herald its triumphs,
but to argue that its evocation of print, or what Jerome McGann might call a
virtual bibliographic coding, grounds Amazon’s promotion of its
revolutionary nature . If McGann writes to remind
literary critics that print materiality is constitutive of meaning, then I
suggest that something similar is true for the Kindle. The print conventions
Amazon invokes in the Kindle’s form and functionality recall traditional
pleasures of solitary reading; in so doing, they also call attention to the
Kindle’s difference — to the interface and features that place it at a remove
from print. The Kindle turns to print as the embodied spirit of reading that
will now acquire a new legibility.
Interrogating the Kindle in this way is to focus on
Amazon’s negotiation of an ideological terrain of reading. But any
understanding of the sea change effected by the Kindle’s remediation of print
reading must also take into account the response to the device. This is to
extend the line of thinking Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin pursue when they
address what impact the remediation characteristic of new digital media has on
subjectivity. Their premise that
…we
see ourselves today in and through our available media
defines the
subject in an intimate relation to media, and that relation, they suggest, tips
over to a kind of mediated interpellation
.
The subject who watches a film adaptation of a novel
bring[s],
they assert,
a notion of self appropriate to voiced prose
; that subject is hailed by both the novel
and the film that puts it on the big screen, and her agency emerges out of the
work of representation. While Bolter and Grusin take care to delineate the
agencies specific to remediated subjectivity — the virtual self, for instance,
can, thanks to her immersion, shift her self by shifting her point of view —
they do not address how the responses these subjects might have to their
remediation can further illuminate its workings. To the extent that their focus
lies with deployment, with what a networked self does in
being connected,
they do not imagine the work
of reception. My point in examining the Kindle’s remediation of reading is to
interrogate it, on the one hand, as an instance of subject formation in which
Amazon has invested rhetoric, time, and money, and, on the other hand, to treat
the reception of the device as an index of the tensions that continue to
underlie the relations between print and digital spheres. I therefore include
the ways in which self-identified readers return Amazon’s address, and suggest
that their comments often turn that address on its head. For the responses of
Kindle readers — proponents as well as fence-sitters and detractors —
constitutes a discourse on disappearance, a troping that reveals just how
literally the material impact of reading is registered. This discourse emerges
out of a series of moments, and in constructing from them a biography of the
device I argue that what Kindle-reading has come to mean is marked in no small
way by readers’
refusal of Amazon’s vision for reading. When
readers turn to
Fahrenheit 451 to describe
parallels between Kindle-reading and book burning, when they object to the
exclusivity of Stephen King’s Kindle novella, and critique the deletions of
Orwell’s
1984 from thousands of Kindle libraries,
their prior investments in reading inflect their response to the device.
Kindle-reading has therefore generated a possessiveness about reading.
It looks and acts like a book
The first physical product of Amazon’s making, the Kindle was from the start no
eye-pleaser. Even over the course of its evolution it neither achieved nor
sought the sleekness vaunted by so many technophiles or the friendly aesthetic
of Apple products. The first version, an off-white plastic rectangle, was plain
in shape, color, and material, and inspired dismay and not a little disdain.
Early reviews of this first Kindle made much of this plainness, commenting, and
at times complaining, that Amazon’s device could not compare, at least
aesthetically, with Apple’s iPod or iPhone: I briefly looked at it and my first reaction is that
the gadget is not sexy. I mean, when you look at an iPod or iPhone, you feel
the desire to own it, partly because of it’s [sic] looks (don’t deny!). The
things I didn’t like are the plastic look and the odd shape with sharp
corners…If you own a iPod Video or an iPhone, you know how cool the round
corners [are] with a steel casing .
Compared to Amazon’s account of the Kindle’s ergonomic design, one that emphasized how the device is as easy to hold and use as a book, Paul
Thurrott’s assessment foregrounds the relationship between affect and aesthetic.
The Kindle is strictly pragmatic, its multiple features designed in the service
of reading rather than, say, in anticipation of pleasure. Its privileging of
function creates, as Thurrott put it, little desire, while the iPod, pleasing to
the eye, generates the desire to own
it.
This split between form and function turns on the yoking of
desire with aesthetics, generating much of the commentary that there was no
pleasure to be had from the Kindle’s look. This is the point Thurrott goes on to
make in his more sustained review: The Amazon Kindle is a small, white, slate-type computing device with a
6-inch screen and a small QWERTY keyboard with Chiclet-like keys. In many
ways, the Kindle is the anti-iPod, the ego to Apple’s id. They’re both white
portable devices with screens. But the similarities end there. Where Apple’s
devices are Spartan in design, favoring form over function, the Kindle is
all buttons and ports, a utilitarian device that was quite obviously
designed around the content you’ll be reading onscreen and virtually nothing
else. This is what the extreme version of function over form looks like, and
its [sic] hard not to wonder whether there isn’t a happy medium between the
Kindle and Apple’s form over function devices .
Thurrott’s comparison attributes to each device a particular aesthetic and
affect, doing so in such a way as to further distinguish the Kindle from the
iPod: purpose versus pleasure, function over form, id pit in opposition to ego.
Indeed if his focus pushes reading to the margins — somewhat appropriately,
since the iPod did not feature reading capacity until later — it also enacts the
strict functionality he ascribes to the Kindle approach to reading. There is, as
he puts it, virtually nothing else.
Embedded in this rather damning assessment is, however, a logic that the Kindle’s
aesthetic presupposes a view of reading as a disappearing act. In a
Newsweek interview following the launch of the device
Bezos touched on this view as he argued for the Kindle’s distinctiveness. On the
one hand, he observed, its portability, wirelessness, and storage capacity would
foster reading by bringing readers closer and more quickly to the act. Indeed
these features define the Kindle through its capacity to do things
that ordinary books can’t do
. On the other hand, he also insisted that the Kindle’s
looks possessed an awareness of form, in particular, the codex form of books.
His response to the commentary swirling around the Kindle’s appearance thus
pivots on books and their materiality:
I’ve actually asked myself, Why do I love these physical objects? Why do
I love the smell of glue and ink?
’
. The answer, he went on to say, resides in the smell
that reminds him of
all those worlds I
have been transported to…the key feature of a book is that it
disappears
. Physical sensuality —
the smell of glue and ink
— enables the
fantastic, the imagination of
all
those worlds I have been transported to
. If books are made, and their sensual existence as
made objects prompts bibliophilia, some of their force resides nonetheless in
their immateriality, in their ability to disappear. When read, the book loses
its force — its charge — as a physical object; it gives up something of its
physicality. While the good faith of Bezos’ comments remains uncertain at best,
and while some of the changes in the later Kindle editions have reconfigured its
design, it’s important to note that his remarks align reading with form and its
erasure. Over the course of the Kindle’s history Amazon has continued to
idealize this sense of disappearance in a way that echoes the familiar saying
that one is lost to the world when reading a good book. From this point of view,
one that Amazon has made profitable, plainness of design aligns the Kindle with
this elusive immateriality.
This investment in immateriality draws on and magnifies the sensibility that
idealizes books as icons of culture. To understand this relation is to note, as
one commentator did early on, that an aura of bookishness
makes the Kindle less of a whizzy gizmo than an austere vessel of
culture
. The Kindle’s pursuit of the bookish aura has meant
eschewing material traits that signify mechanized gadgetry in favor of the
unassuming shape and dimensions of a paperback: a slender, slight thing with a
tapered silhouette it emulates the
bulge toward a book’s binding
. The early Kindle looked like a printed paperback, and
Amazon’s rhetoric made clear that this resemblance was both deliberate (there’s
a reason it doesn’t look like an iPod) and purposeful (it seeks to
do something with this mimicry). Indeed the first Kindle
featured on its back cover a series of glyphs, from Egyptian hieroglyphics,
Norse runes, and Mesopotamian cuneiform, Hebrew and Arabic script, Greek, and
Germanic blackletter, as well as variations of the Romance letterform, that
together suggested the evolution of written language, inscribed here as an
element of the Kindle’s design. As Robert Mohns notes, the glyphs embedded
in the Kindle’s cover constitute its one real concession to design for design’s sake
[…] It’s a brilliant graphic, expressing the evolution of written
language ... and the heights Amazon hopes Kindle will achieve
. In the context of the Kindle’s homage to
the book, this representation also recalls scrolls, paper, manuscripts: an
invocation of the medium as well as the history of writing and reading. The
inscribed glyphs point, therefore, to the book’s long history as an austere vessel of culture.
Books possess this status because they are said to transcend the materiality
that defines them — their bindings, covers, and pages — by disappearing from
view when read. Referring to this transcendence, the Kindle thereby assumes its
austerity. In so doing, it becomes an instrument of culture, a vessel
that like the book knows it place.
In this context I want to underscore how the Kindle’s mimicry both calls
attention to and absorbs its revolutionary status. This dynamic is especially
apparent in talk about the Kindle screen, which Amazon from the outset has
heralded as a technological advance that nonetheless maintains reading as it is.
For when the website asserts that the Kindle provides a reading experience
as sharp and natural as reading ink
on paper — and nothing like the strain and glare of a computer
screen,
its gesture sets the device in relation to both book and
computer, places it closer to the book, and perhaps most significantly,
naturalizes Kindle-reading through the association.The first Kindle
featured electronic paper,
while more recent Kindles incorporate
E-Ink Pearl display. The rhetoric remains the same. Paper is the
measure of the Kindle screen as it indexes readability, and perhaps more
importantly, enables the bookish feat of disappearing. As fantasy writer Neil
Gaiman put it in his testimonial, It’s
very, very crisp. Very functional. Very readable
. In his account, meanwhile, author Michael Lewis echoes
Bezos when he notes that after five
minutes I’ve ceased to think I’m looking at a screen
. Endorsements like these rend the Kindle of
technological resonance, while celebrating, almost breathlessly, the advances in
technology that have made that erasure possible. Indeed the point might be made
that the former enables the latter — the Luddite stance, one that understands
reading in all-but pastoral terms, promotes the claim that we are on the cusp of
something revolutionary. Or perhaps is it the other way around? When
Lemony Snicket author Daniel Handler compares the
Kindle to a book he emphasizes that the latter requires no connectivity:
You just have to put it in your hands and
read it
. Here the
point of Kindle technology
appears to be its mimicry of the book. Wireless, the Kindle disdains cables,
plug-ins, or battery life; the device is so advanced it’s simple. Implicit in
this claim is the primacy of books as technology par excellence. In this way the
author’s delight in the Kindle’s wirelessness reminds his audience that the book
has always been so unwired.
As witnesses to Kindle-reading, these authors — whom Amazon invited to try out
the device — also legitimate the Kindle through scenes in which the device
intensifies reading. Their presence matters, then, because their significance
as readers derives as much from their authorial positioning as
it does from their bibliophilia. Of these testimonials Steve Kessel,
Amazon’s vice president of digital media, reported that Amazon had
approached numerous authors several months before the launch, returning to
film them discussing their reactions to the product. We don't do a lot of print and other
marketing,
he observed, What we wanted to do is put Kindle in the hands
of people that we knew were lovers of books to get their reaction to
it... Who better to test the experience than authors?
. When Amazon claims them as people…we knew were lovers of
books,
its gesture is to assure would-be owners that the device has
the right kind of backing. Book-lovers, the authors are first figured in
domestic terms, appearing in shots of spaces lined with books, speaking about
the Kindle from comfy chairs. When they speak about where the Kindle can go,
their terms shift to the Kindle’s mobility, the likes of which makes it equally
accessible at home, in airport terminals, and airplanes. The global author —
Gaiman cites traveling from Beijing to Budapest, while Toni Morrison refers to
giving talks around the world — in this way implies that the Kindle can confer
something of his or her cosmopolitanism to reading. One early slogan for
the Kindle was Buy once, read
everywhere.
This yoking of the domestic with the global cosmopolitan perpetuates the
sense that the Kindle’s advances are so astonishing that reading, far from
losing its transformative force, is just as magical as ever: perhaps even more
so, given the Kindle’s affinity for travel. In a conflation of technology with
magic, the Kindle contains books even as it snatches them out of thin air. What
this means for the reader, Morrison observes, is an almost magical subjectivity.
In her testimonial Morrison draws on the equation of reading with empowerment
before describing the Kindle as a spell for agency, one that allows
readers to do reading in ways previously unimaginable. That sense of I own it now
is the
best thing about reading anyway,
she says — and the Kindle
intensifies that experience because it’s faster, it’s lighter, [and] I can carry it and I can have more at my
disposal
. Possession goes hand in hand with
self-possession because Kindle-reading makes that affiliation
literally — materially — possible. In the reverse of this thinking Gaiman claims
that the Kindle’s ease of use matches the intuitiveness with which readers
approach books. Indeed, if the Kindle’s ability to retrieve books is impressive
because it resembles having a genie on call, it is his experience of
Kindle-reading over which he lingers. After reading for a few minutes, he
remembers, I’d done the thing that you
do with books where you’re actually on the other side of the text…there’s
nothing between you and the story…you’re in book-reading land
. Like Morrison’s reference to the spell of reading,
Gaiman’s account is of the reader magicked, an Alice who crosses with the Kindle
in hand to the Wonderland that book-reading has always been. This Kindle-reading
is therefore fantastically familiar. In the discourse of
technoculture, I might use the term automagic,
which describes a
process that occurs so seamlessly and automatically that it appears as
magic. Techies use the term as a rhetorical sneer, a gesture that among
other things, opposes technology and magic, and insists that reading must
always rely on technology. My thanks to John Laudun for making me aware of
the term.
A recursive logic, then, underlies claims that the Kindle is extraordinary, and a
bookish resonance remains even when Bezos and other Kindle advocates insist that
the Kindle differs in kind from the book. That this logic extends as far as
features touted explicitly for their pragmatism suggests the extent to which the
Kindle needs this evocation of book-reading. In its marketing Amazon has made
much of the device for its ability to meet readerly needs, highlighting, for
instance, alterable font size, ever-increasing storage capacity, and search
features as conveniences designed with the reader in mind. And specific readerly
needs — economic, technological — frame the accounts of each of the Kindles
currently on the market: there exists, it’s implied, a Kindle for every
need. Thus the Kindle Wi-Fi, targeted at the user who seeks usage tied
to wireless capacity at home and elsewhere, or the Kindle 3G, for those who
imagine usage in terms parallel to cell phone roaming, or the Kindle app,
for usage across platforms and media. In all these instances the
Kindle functions, as one observer notes, as an extension of the familiar Amazon store,
and
foregrounds service as a constitutive dimension of the reading it imagines . To put it slightly differently, Amazon is frank in its
claim that the Kindle anticipates and offers what readers need: it is there
before reading actually takes place, preparing the way for its felicitous
happening. At the same time, this pragmatism is enabled by the sensibility that
as an act, reading requires, if it does not deserve, such service. Free chapter
samples seek to create anticipation, but so do they rely upon the notion that
anticipation is one of reading’s greatest pleasures. The canniness of these
samples therefore derives from their intimation of the particular value of
pleasure and its attachment to reading. Since 2009, sampling and reading
could also occur on smart mobile phones and on computers using Kindle
software; in fall 2010, Amazon announced that readers could now sample first
chapters via web browsers. Meanwhile a reader can also look for a book by
searching the entire contents of the Kindle Store. Like the dynamic
that defines the actual act of purchase, this tableau of reading on demand
justifies turning immediacy into a consumer good by recalling the good
associated with reading. The notion that the Kindle’s speed of delivery
serves reading confers some of that loftiness onto the device,
softening the consumerist logic that equates an Amazonian subject’s desire with
need. If the Kindle exceeds the material limits of reading it does so by
insisting on the value of remaining attached to them.
Kindling?
The legibility of that value emerged early on in discourse that tied the Kindle
to Ray Bradbury’s novel
Farhenheit 451. official Amazon stance
foregrounded an idiomatic use of the term — in an interview a senior public
relations staff manager asserted that
we named the device the Kindle…because we want to kindle people’s love of
reading
— public speculation moved very quickly to translate that
vision into something more literal
. This more
skeptical reading of the device’s name inserted books as the objects of a
material kindling, thereby resisting Amazon’s figure of the Kindle as the bearer
of a populist reading that spreads like fire.
See Steven Heller, Who Named the Kindle (and Why)?
[http://www.printmag.com/article/who-named-the-kindle-(and-why)](http://www.printmag.com/article/who-named-the-kindle-(and-why).)
. In this interview, Karen Hibma recalls Voltaire as
an inspiration for the device name: instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our
neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others and it becomes
the property of all.
Even a report that the design team had chosen
Kindle because it was
memorable and meaningful in many ways of expression
could not
dissuade posters on forums and message board discussions from asserting that the
origin of the Kindle’s naming lay in the novel’s dystopic milieu
. Implicit in those conversations was the suggestion
that the institutionalized book burning in
451 had
an analog in the virtuality Kindle books occupy: thanks to that association, the
Kindle’s naming acquired a graphic ideological tenor, one made excessive by
virtue of the material act described. Taking Bradbury’s novel as the Kindle’s
eerie precedent thus enabled readers to articulate their unease, and in so
doing, generated a resistant understanding that reading
451 on a
Kindle would constitute an act of supreme irony.
When Ray Bradbury pronounced at BookExpo 2008 that there is no future for e-books, because they are not
books
his comment fueled a reading that had already intertwined the
Kindle with the novel . See also Susan King
2010. In this short interview, Bradbury says that he was approached three times during the last year by Internet
companies wanting to put my books
on an electronic reading
device. I said to Yahoo, Prick up your
ears and go to hell.
The author’s quip that e-books smell like burned fuel
predicted doom for
the Kindle in the fiery terms
451 sets out, but it
also resonated with a metacritical impulse that readers on Amazon forums — where
both Bradbury and the Kindle have a loyal and close following — were
articulating. In two forums devoted to the Bradbury-Kindle affair, Amazon
readers expressed their sympathy and respect for Bradbury’s position, but were
nearly uniform in their conclusion that the Kindle and Bradbury need not be
opposed. His insistence on keeping his works only in print was explicable, as
one poster wrote,
since KINDLE
implies the onset of burning,
and to that extent the novel
should be the poster child for the
anti-e-reader movement
. On this view the privilege
451 accords to books has everything to do with their physicality,
and Bradbury’s hostility towards the Kindle, understood here as a dystopic end
to print materiality, is justifiable. The majority of posts, however, claim the
Kindle for its potential to skirt that future through an increase in reading,
and go on to argue that the device could constitute
a serious library
that could act as a
survival venue quietly and easily
hiding books for future generations
.
In another post whitearrow writes that
once a book is in ebook
format, it's literally impossible to destroy every copy. It can be
passed from person to person digitally
. Rendered a virtual analog to the
Book People Montag meets outside the city, the Kindle becomes in this account a
book partisan, a savior, even, for books in hiding. In one exchange readers took
this line of thinking further still, suggesting, interestingly, that a
comprehensive digitization of books, had it occurred, would have pre-empted the
scenario
Fahrenheit 451 imagines. Digitization
would have made Bradbury’s firemen unnecessary because there would have been
…no chance of self-doubt and
hiding books in ventilation shafts,
or, more radically,
F-451 could not have happened
with
no story line
to propel it
forward
;
. That both
assertions speculate about a past that did not occur — a past in which the
firemen, fictional or not, never existed — testifies, I think, to the posters’
imagination of reading in a world of Kindles. For both posters, apparently aware
of the fantastic historicizing at the heart of much dystopic fiction, subject
the fictional history posited by
Fahrenheit 451 to
a similar fate. In so doing they emphasize what another reader calls
the irony that the author of
Fahrenheit 451 is opposed to unburnable,
indestructible e-books
.
In Ray Bradbury’s
Books on Kindle Edition, manco 82 observes how amazing [it is] that the author
of F-451 would be against something that increases reading
. On this view Kindle reading (or the
technology of reading the Kindle represents) is aligned with posterity while
Bradbury, somewhat strangely, becomes an author without a story.
For all the protesting on Bradbury’s part, Kindle readers considered, queried,
ventured opinions about, and debated the work the Kindle might do (or not do)
for reading by citing the novel as the Kindle’s metaphorical ground. That this
gesture anchored the Kindle in fiction, that a literary representation of a
dystopic future should frame an understanding of the device, produced no qualms:
readers were willing to assume the link between device and text, and thereby
granted
451 an explanatory authority. That
authority generated much of the conversation about information control and
censorship, and turned the world Bradbury represents into a likely model for the
unforeseen consequences of Kindle reading. Bradbury’s vision of a world forced
to accept book burning in the name of civility and peace should, these posters
argued, force Kindle owners to think about the security of reading in the
digital moment.
W. Cook writes, But the whole government controls what you can and can't read thing?
Vastly easier in a digital world. Does no one remember the 1984/Animal
House incident?
. For some, the analogy renewed the issue of
banning precisely because it suggested that e-books, touted for their
immateriality, were no less vulnerable than their print counterparts. Indeed one
line of thought reiterated that e-books are particularly susceptible because
their materiality is less trace-able. When one reader reported that Amazon had
reached down to my Kindle and
deleted the book
he had returned earlier for a refund, he
articulated his unease with Amazon’s reach in a way that clarifies another’s
anxiety about scale:
if all books
become e books, isn’t it very easy to control what books are allowed? Have I
read too much 1984???
.
Ron B. Turiya’s post leads off this thread
. A similarly dystopic view fueled a
series of posts concerned that the Kindle could make what one reads open, and
therefore useable and exploitable, knowledge. Here the
reader’s
security is said to be at stake, and the prospect of institutional access to
one’s readerly choices (the thread also takes up the notion that the government
is a corporation) becomes something like surveillance. This possibility unnerved
even the most vocal of Kindle supporters on the
Amazon
Kindle: The Start of the Fahrenheit 451 reality? forum which opened
by asking
Is there danger in giving
CORPORATIONS knowledge of what books you have read?
. The familiar belief in Kindles and their fluid
materiality thus runs aground an anxiety the novel depicts: about being tracked,
about leaving a trace. However much they endorsed the e-book for its
elusiveness, however much they imagined themselves as virtual Book People whose
preservation of books means erasing their physicality, readers articulated
unease when contemplating the prospect of having
their own readerly
selves found out.
These responses, in refering to Bradbury’s novel to make sense of what the Kindle
might mean to reading, converged on the broader worry that the Kindle might
displace culture. That these responses occurred with regularity online, cropping
up on blogs and websites and forums devoted, on the one hand, to e-books, and on
the other, to science fiction, that they emerged with some mass on Amazon
testifies to the coherence of a discourse about reading that takes the literary
as its precedent. Here a longstanding debate about genre witnesses readerly
protectiveness of
451, of the novel’s status that
the Kindle was said to threaten. For those Kindle advocates who were also
self-identified readers of science fiction, this tension was as familiar as it
was frustrating, for in casting science fiction in opposition to
literature,
it damned the legitimacy of the genre with faint praise.
This view then fingered the Kindle for its complicity in isolating
451 from the literary, suggesting that reading
451 with a Kindle tainted the novel with the very
technophilia it critiques (here Bradbury’s comment that the novel is less an
anti-censorship screed and more so a manifesto for literature acquires new
strength). In this context that the Kindle’s relation to the literary canon
should emerge as an issue is not surprising. Readers who reveled in the prospect
of downloading canonicity at little cost — most of Austen’s novels, for
instance, are available for free as Kindle books — faced the disdain of those
who not only expressed a preference for print but insisted, in a way Bourdieu
would recognize, that it is the rightful medium for the reading, say, of
Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night. The
association with the Kindle raised readerly hackles and was
said to diminish
451’s credibility as a literary
classic (this despite the fact that it exists only in print). The reception of
Bradbury’s novel and the Kindle are therefore
mutually illuminating
of how readers articulated their desires around the literary. To take a more
synthetic view, however much the Kindle divided readers, that split emerged with
all the more force when the literary was at stake. As a result, the Kindle
emerged as an agent of the novel’s erasure from literature.
If discourse on the Kindle saw readers reaching for
Fahrenheit 451 to understand their newly mediated relationship to
reading, the reception of the novel on Amazon found in the novel’s cautionary
rhetoric a coherent view of the shape and fate of reading in the Kindle age. The
novel, to put it another way, provided readers with an analogy for anxieties
about the Kindle’s capacity to make print obsolescent, to make its disappearance
a reality. Thus while Amazon reviews of
451
preceded the Kindle’s release by a decade, discussion of shifts in media
technology and their impact on reading were in the air from the outset — in the
title of the first review,
Literal bookburning in a world too like our own,
and in the early remark that the novel
raises issues about…letting the
technological wonders of the 90's take over the simplest pleasures
. And in the months leading up to the Kindle’s
release in November 2007 reviews of the novel hewed closely to the position that
the doom Bradbury imagines for books — as one post put it,
one of the most important devices ever created by
man
— had proven prophetic
. For in
this modern day burst
culture
of Blackberry’s, Wi-Fi, 24/7 TV and countless entertainment
outlets,
and as
TV screens get bigger and clearer as people walk around with iPod earbuds
blaring, ignoring one another completely
books are understood to stand little chance of
engaging attention. In comments like these, posters described the immediacy of
attention these demanded, and implied of book reading that its mediations,
however meaningful or pleasurable, were thereby obscured. Indeed in reviews that
both predate and follow the release of the Kindle, posters echoed a lament that
had fueled much of the early public discourse about the digital and new media
supported by it precisely by sounding a death knell for reading. As melancholic
as Sven Birkerts, these reviews constructed and cohered around an opposition in
which reading
ought to have nothing to do with media. If for
Birkerts reading is immersive, an act of measured consideration, of slow and
deliberate existence,
451 endorses this view,
reviewers argued, through its unflinching account of life without books. Again
and again the reading of
451 triggers a diagnosis
of contemporary culture; again and again the reading of
451 occasions references to reading made bereft,
robbed of literacy and creativity
by…such mindnumbing channels as TV, social media, gaming, internet surfing,
etc.
. The impulse to translate the novel’s account of a
culture
detached from people…and, of
course, books
to the reader’s context thus generates the sensibility
that reading by nature is
antithetical to the status quo
451 represents
.
Nostalgic for reading before it disappears, these reviews of
451 are all the more striking because they refer to
Kindle-reading despite the fact that the novel, as a result of Bradbury’s
insistence, remains only in print. Indeed, that Amazon constitutes the
infrastructure for their commentary, that the device embodies reading imagined
by Amazon foregrounds for these reviewers that their reading of
Fahrenheit 451 must be marked by it in some way.
Kindle reading, in other words, becomes for these reviewers an almost
irresistible example of the novel’s cautionary rhetoric. Meanwhile, if the
novel’s sense of the inevitable prompted an urgency of response to Montag’s
world, so did it emphasize for posters the sense of
this moment in
the history of reading, when
books
have been translated into electronic forms and more and more people watch
television and laze around
. Implicit references to the Kindle index this
awareness, as reviewers, wondering to what extent virtual reading resembles
video game play or web surfing, articulated the blurring of contemporary media
use with contemporary reading practices. These rather more tangential
observations about media culture stand in contrast to the explicit references
that charge the Kindle with displacing relations of production long enabled by
print.
The most important thing
about this book is how much more relevant it seems today than when it was
written,
writes one reader.
Today, newspapers and print media are going away
(thanks, kindle)
. Either unaware, indifferent, or skeptical of the
newspaper subscriptions the Kindle makes possible, this reader insisted the
Kindle’s existence means the erasure of print. His error is less at issue here
than his belief that the novel’s importance lies in its present relevance, for
that occasions the directness with which he yokes the Kindle to the
circumstances depicted in
Fahrenheit 451. Like many
of his fellow reviewers, this reader applauds the novel for its futurist
imagination of a stark moment in the history of reading. His comments are
distinctive because they turn directly to the Kindle, and, in situating the
device in a history of reading parallel to the world of
451, he emphasizes the irony that the device is an Amazon
product.
See Paul Theis’ remark that I find it very ironic that Amazon is out with
their new product Kindle
. That references like these represent only
a fraction of the reviews of
451 uploaded since
June 1996 (1407) is an oddity given that elsewhere, particularly on the Amazon
forums devoted to Bradbury or the device, the discourse is rife with commentary
linking the Kindle with
451. These forums were full
of commentary about the kind of kindling the device would make possible: either
the demise of books or their human reincarnation. Why, then, has the dynamic not
been reciprocal? More specifically, if
451 readers
willingly imagined the novel’s relevance to the contemporary milieu, and openly
discussed the position of book culture in this moment, then how does the
Kindle’s absence signify? As a body the reviews focus on the novel’s social
critique of a world without books in a way that makes the Kindle’s absence from
that critique pronounced. In a way, though, this absence is fitting. For it
marks a
readerly enactment of the device’s disappearance from the
scene of reading.
Ur reading
While the association with
Fahrenheit 451 originated
in the Kindle’s first release, it has extended to the device’s entire biography,
marking it broadly with narrative and political resonance. Indeed to a certain
extent
451 so prevails in the imagination of Kindle
readers that their attachments to the novel’s metaphorical force yields the
device sui generis: the Kindle as such. The security of this attachment,
however, began to unravel shortly after Amazon, announcing the release of the
Kindle 2 (February 2009), also revealed that it had commissioned a story from
Stephen King that if pre-ordered, would appear on Kindle screens on the day of
its release. King readers in particular responded with enthusiasm that the
author had inscribed his stamp on the device — in
Ur a Kindle with hyperbolic features allows the protagonist to
download novels written in alternate dimensions as well as news from that
urgently compelling dimension, the future — but also expressed dismay that he
had agreed to the commission in the first place. For a significant portion of
these fans the commission bound King to Amazon, and interrupted a prior, and
more meaningful relation between an author and his readers.
No burning
occurs in Ur, but it’s worth noting that King’s
1980 novel Firestarter raises, albeit
minimally, the relationship between burning and textuality. At the end of
the novel, the protagonist Charlie McGee, having escaped from the government
agency The Shop, takes her story to the New York offices of Rolling Stone magazine in an effort to publicize
the events that led to her father’s death. In a striking echo of Fahrenheit 451, fire consumes everything but the
story, which lives on in the person who tells it .
My thanks go to Jessica Pressman and Lisa Swanstrom for reminding me of the
novel. Taken by the prospect of having
Ur materialize on Kindles on the day of its release, struck by the
fitness of having a King story about a Kindle appear on thousands of Kindles,
these readers were equally taken aback by their sense that Amazon had intruded
on, and therefore weakened what they knew, felt about, and expected from
reading.
Ur inflected their unease that the Kindle
could unmake their status as readers and owners of Kindles and the texts that
appear on them.
The two initial sources framing the news that
Ur
was on the horizon — the official King website and Amazon’s press release —
first positioned author and device as an irresistible match, a pairing that
promised great things. The King website greeted readers first with the reminder
that the author’s longstanding history
as a writer who constantly redefines his readers’ experience [sic] by
working in various genres and formats
testifies to his ability
to deliver a reading experience
like no one else can
.
Ur is no exception, the
web blurb goes on to remark, for it bears King’s signature qualities and
demonstrates them in his command of a form that the blurb notes is fast
disappearing. While this account defers mention of the Kindle until the bottom
of the page, its reference to genre, and its claim that
Ur gives the novella new life, anticipate the link to the Kindle
press release by emphasizing King as an author open to (and practiced in)
innovation. King’s generic flexibility thus frames the way the website figures
the Kindle as a technological chameleon. The Amazon press release, meanwhile,
follows a similar rhetoric. There the announcement of the Kindle 2, emphatic
about this edition’s improvements, goes hand in hand with a summary of the
extraordinary events that occur when Wesley Smith receives a mysterious pink
Kindle in the mail. The breathless claim that the Kindle 2 is
thinner, faster, crisper, with longer
battery life and capable of holding hundreds more books
thus
corresponds to the observation that the
Ur Kindle
unlocks a literary world that
even the most avid of book lovers could never imagine
. Meanwhile the boast that the Read-to-Me feature is
something new we added that a
book could never do
anticipates the flourish that the
Ur Kindle opens doors to
things that one hopes we’ll never read or live
through.
Rhetorical counterparts, these tie the device to its
textual self. In so doing, they situate King in the middle, and foreground his
authorship as a bridge between Amazon’s Kindle and the Kindle of
Ur.
Aligning the two Kindles was, of course, a marketing gesture, one that sought to
create anticipation by blurring the lines between product and representation.
While readers were well aware of the realities of this gesture, and, as I will
argue, prepared to live by their readerly critique of it, this symmetry set out
the terms by which they nonetheless continued to idealize the bond linking
device and text. King himself participated in this conversation, observing
shortly after the story’s release that his condition for writing
a story for the Kindle was his desire to
do one about the
Kindle
(original emphasis)
. Meanwhile King
fans, quick to assert that the author’s metafictional gesture was no surprise —
as one poster put it,
Leave it to
King to write a story about the Kindle on the Kindle
— were just as quick to claim
Ur
for the Kindle. Several describe choosing
Ur as the first download for their new Kindle 2s, suggesting that
the text’s fantastic Kindle has inflected their enthusiasm for the device and
its new features
;
;
;
. One reader says of
Ur that it marks
a great way to start my new adventure in
reading,
while another claims that
I can’t imagine a better way to have broken in my
new toy
: out of positions like these
Ur
emerges as an exemplary Kindle text
;
;
. This sense of
exemplarity reached its apex when
Ur reviewers
agreed that the novella, because of its especially immersive nature, should
come pre-loaded on all new
Kindles.
That
Ur is said to suit the
Kindle because it is so wholly absorbing — one Kindle owner compares finishing
the novella to the feeling of leaving the movie theater
after seeing Star Wars for the first time
—
means that for this readership, the proximity to the world of
Ur defines their Kindle reading
. On the flip side of this thinking, readers embraced
the Kindle as material confirmation of King’s device. Whatever their praise for
Ur, these reviews insisted that reading with a
Kindle enhanced the intensity of the
Ur experience.
Reading it on a Kindle added to
the uniqueness of the novella,
writes one poster,
it was fun as King talked about the
various features and menus of the Kindle to be able to see what he was
talking about while reading
. Toggling between text and device, this reader
grounds his experience of
Ur on the physicality of
the Kindle, looking to its body to establish what he reads on its screen. For
this reader a matter of fun, this closeness produces for another an enjoyable
shiver, the result of reading
and writing her review of
Ur on a Kindle.
As only the master himself
could, Stephen King does it again and strikes fear of the everyday into
our hearts. Reading this on a Kindle (and writing the review on one as
well) becomes very disturbing as this modern retelling of the classic
the monkey’s paw unfolds
. These descriptions emphasize what
other reviews will frame as an aptness of correspondence — of Kindle reading
Ur one concludes,
It really doesn’t get much better than that
—
one that makes even
thinking about reading
Ur on other devices seem a pale, because lesser, reflection of a
Kindled
Ur
.
I read this on an iPad using the
Amazon Kindle app and can’t help but think the experience would have
been better using an actual kindle
. All this is to say that the turn to
symmetry works in both directions. For if it claims
Ur as the exemplary Kindle
text it also declares the
Kindle as the best
medium for the reading of the novella.
The enthusiasm generated by the Kindle and
Ur
pairing in turn indexed readerly identifications. Thus a number of reviewers
described their pleasure at the novella’s speculative literary histories,
remarking that they, like Wesley Smith, would find an unheard-of Hemingway or an
unpublished Poe an irresistible temptation. Others admitted, significantly, to a
jealousy prompted by
Ur's account of universes in
which authors long-dead continue to write. A fascinating mix of affect, these
comments articulate posters’ identities as
book-obsessed, as
avid readers whose desires
Ur both illustrates and renders fantastic. King fans,
meanwhile, insisted that their history of reading, and not a one-time corporate
commission, constituted an authentic exclusive relation to the author. Here the
Constant Reader — a figure of loyalty in King fan discourse since the
publication of
Misery — emerged as a point from
which readers, citing the novella’s intertextual references to the
Dark Tower series, could recommend
Ur as a King classic.
I would not suggest this novella unless you have
read other King works,
remarks one poster,
There are many references that only a Constant
Reader will understand
. The fact of these references occasioned the
distinction between casual reader and King fan, and enabled the latter to argue
that
Ur,
not a story for the first time King
reader,
belonged to those for whom its references were already
foundational knowledge
. To write in about
Ur's intertextuality was thus to claim this constancy
in reading. The refrain that
Ur needs an expert
King reader thus privileges a knowing intimacy, one made all the more exclusive
by what one reader calls
hidden
references, or, more broadly, by the
sense that with
Ur King was
perpetuating [sic] the inside joke
we have
all come to know and love over the years
;
. Claimed in this way,
Ur reinforces the authority of the King
readership by emphasizing the intersubjective dynamic at the heart of
intertextuality. The
inside joke
confirmed the
primacy of
communication between author and readers, and King’s
Dark
Tower references, understood in this way,
make me feel like I am part of a secret
society
.
That there exists a correspondence between the novella’s articulation of readerly
investments and readers’ insistence on clarifying their identifications goes a
long way to explaining the strength of their feelings about
Ur as a Kindled text. For when
Ur
readers declare their readerly selves they do no less than the novella’s
protagonist, whose views on the Kindle shift from refusal to fascination to
horror.
Ur's plot shifts into high gear when a pink
Kindle, appearing mysteriously at Wesley Smith’s door, pushes him — on the heels
of an unhappy break-up — to break from his rather Luddite notions and give the
device a try. The scene thus associates the Kindle’s sudden, inexplicable
presence with the beginnings of a medial shift in reading for Smith, for whom
books are simultaneously professional and personal objects. More entrenched in
his identification with print than many
Ur readers,
Smith embodies a romanticized, vocational book reading, and in this way he too
figures a constancy of reading, a fidelity to books — he considers them his
cherished
friends
— he will not dream of betraying
. The
minor chill
he feels when a
student in one of his literature classes demonstrates that the image of pages on
the Kindle screen
flutter, like in a
real book
testifies to his unease with its bibliographic
remediation; when this sense intensifies with the arrival of his Kindle, so does
the chill
. Indeed, faced with
operating his own Kindle Smith’s imagination takes a horrific turn, and he
contemplates turning the device off, as the narrator puts it, before
a hand — or perhaps a claw — was going to
swim up from the grayness of the Kindle’s screen, grab him by the throat and
yank him in
. If King’s gesture to grant this Kindle
a monstrous agency follows, as many
Ur readers
observed, a line of thinking the author had already pursued elsewhere, its force
lies in the way it marks the Kindle’s remediation in uncanny terms.
See,
for instance, Cell
and Word Processor of the
Gods
. Remediation at this moment is as
aggressive as any of the instances Bolter and Grusin describe precisely in its
threat to the reader’s self-possession. This tension increases when Smith, after
having discovered that the Kindle
can reach out to alternate
dimensions, shares with a colleague and a student the knowledge that that range
can put one in touch with literary histories wonderful in their strangeness. In
these Urs, Hemingway, Poe, and Shakespeare author unheard-of texts that read
with authenticity, their remediations constituted by their radical familiarity.
Smith’s colleague says of
A Black Fellow in London,
a play written by one of the several Shakespeares the Kindle locates,
it’s got his lilt
(original emphasis)
. His
observation speaks to the impossible truth of the play’s existence; it also
performs his identity as a reader who is rightly and properly moved by this
truth. Even as it points out the horror of a Kindle that knows no limits,
Ur authenticates Smith and his circle as readers whose
identifications lie with the texts they read.
However forceful, these identifications do not last, displaced when the group
abandons its literary forays to explore other temporalities to which Smith’s
Kindle has access. For would-be
Ur readers access
was precisely the dilemma, as it interrupted the idealized bond between text and
device. The
contingency of
Ur led more
than one poster to urge Amazon and King to issue a print
Ur, claiming that their respective histories of reading the
author’s works should deserve just recompense:
I have everything King so please a BOOK
. Appeals like these constituted the gentler end
of response. For if Amazon had touted the Kindle for increasing access to books,
and if King had done much the same in interviews, the novella’s exclusivity also
generated ill-will, hard-line response and even outright resistance. From this
perspective one reader’s question —
Since when do we have high end books?
— is
simultaneously naïve and pointed, revealing the end to a faith readers had
previously had in Amazon and King and the cynicism that now informed their view
of both company and author
. The populist aura that
Amazon and King had courted, the popularity both enjoyed as one effect of that
stance: neither could absorb what readers perceived as a deliberate production
of inequity. An economics of scale thus drove commentary that refused the
built-in expense of the Kindle that owning
Ur would
require; here readers, finding the Kindle’s price disproportionate to the price
of the novella, shifted the terms of their response to Amazon and held the
company responsible for creating an impossible situation. Even when one poster
declared her decision not to purchase a Kindle her comment was no less pointed
in charging Amazon:
Since I
won’t
be making that purchase, I guess I don’t get to read the
story
. Resigned to her fate, this reader still invokes
the sense that
Ur's exclusivity has stripped her of
rights as a reader. That her resignation is another’s ire is revealing not only
of the range of response generated by
Ur, but also,
and perhaps more importantly, of its personalized nature:
This is how you repay loyal fans, by releasing
something new only in one format? Maybe some of us prefer printed books and
don’t want a Kindle. Ever think of that? It sucks that there’s a new King
book I can’t read. And makes me want to hesitate about buying any more.
Writing about a new King book I can’t
read,
this reader emphasizes the breach that
Ur represents, claiming her right as a fan to read the text,
significantly, by calling attention to her inability to do so. Having agreed to
the commission, King had, on her view, compromised his authorship by aligning
himself with Kindle readers. He was now a Kindled King.
What is a Kindle author, then, and who or what is the author of
Ur? Readers who regarded
Ur as a betrayal asked a version of this question when they charged
King with having abandoned his principles and his fans. And more: Constant
Readers in their critique of King implied that his relation to fans, more than
anything else, had distinguished his authorial integrity, and should continue to
do so. Thus while few questioned
Amazon’s
investment in pursuing King, observing that the company’s behavior was to be
expected and, interestingly, that King’s imagination made him a natural choice
for the enterprise, many fumed at King for what they called improper authorial
conduct. A sense of a moral high ground thus informed almost all the commentary
that viewed
Ur as an instance of product placement
gone awry.
Product placements are a part of our
lives,
writes one reader,
We see it in the film industry, TV is crammed with advertisements, we’re
bombarded with it on radio, billboards, and everywhere possible. We’re all
used to it, but…I don’t want to read it in a Stephen King story/novel(la).
Many of you will over look this and accept it as just part of the story or
possibly even another barrage of some consumerism, but to me it marred what
I would consider to be an excellent tale. I don’t want not-so-subtle
buy-buy-buy messages coming from one of my favorite authors; it just seems
so tawdry.
To the claim that an author’s participation in everyday consumerism seems so tawdry
this reader
suggests a further twist: that in its capacity as a Kindle advertisement or
infomercial
Ur could not be truly literary. Even as
he acknowledges the reality of product placement, the fact that it appears
everywhere possible,
this
reader seeks to draw a line between it and the work of an author he admires.
Over and over again posters like these cited the aesthetic weaknesses —
Ur feels incomplete, rushed, and uninspired — that
resulted, they argued,
from the novella’s commercial
sensibility.
John Fulton Power Reader
remarks that this Kindle
advertising disguised as a short story is neither bad nor boring, but it
feels unfinished and hastened
. Meanwhile Heather Bella writes that the product
placement was a little jarring
and interrupted the flow of the story
. In this way textual criticism,
originating in moral judgment of the commercial, generated a critique of King’s
lapse in authorial judgment. For some, this effect confirmed their suspicions
that the logic driving King’s recent work — work that prompted one reader to
compare the author’s rate of production to
a copy machine,
and another to recall
the Family
Guy riff on King when he’s just pitching a new book idea about a
haunted lamp
— was as corporate as it was ridiculous
;
. Those less willing
to see the ironies of this development opted for sharper critique, framing their
disappointment in terms of a failed transaction between author and reader.
Complaints that
Ur is no more than a
well written advertisement
or that
the reader
should have been paid for
this one
thus implied King’s responsibility in diminishing the value
of readers’ possession of the text. Even the most balanced of these accounts
cited Seth Goldin before going on to offer a blunt assessment of this commercial
occlusion:
this is a product that tells
a story
. In this way
Ur may have
fulfilled its promise to
appear as magically as Smith’s pink
Kindle, but that materialization could not signify enough. The perception that
King had sacrificed
Ur to Amazon for many marked
the loss of the text, or at least the loss of its resonance as
a story.
Hailed for its immediacy,
Ur's presence on Kindle screens turned out,
interestingly, to matter too little.
1984 has come and gone
The reception of
Ur revealed a darker side to the
promise of instant gratification. Indeed this devolution of response suggests
that the
Ur experience had rendered Kindle-reading
dystopic for King readers. The thrill Wesley Smith experiences when his pink
Kindle discovers unheard-of Hemingway novels intensifies his desire to read, but
for King readers, their frisson of pleasure was short-lived. For them the Kindle
had interrupted a much-cherished sense of kinship with the author, and without
that relation, not even the idea of reading Wesley’s Smith near brush with fate
could temper their embitterment. Their ire over the exclusivity of
Ur led King readers to turn against the reading Amazon
imagined for them, to articulate a rather more possessive sense of reading in
response, and ultimately to charge the author himself for having compromised his
bond with readers. This last makes clear that the ownership King readers had in
mind involves the author as a subject whom reading possesses. It would be fair
to say, given the ferocity of critique eventually leveled at King, that readers
felt as strongly about having a relation with the author through reading as they
did about having
Ur appear on their Kindles on the
day of its release. There was no question that Amazon had with
Ur another delivery success on its hands; this pursuit
of day-of-release delivery had endeared the company to Harry Potter fans since
2000, prompting hundreds of thousands to pre-order the novels in order to be
able to put their hands on the books as immediately as possible. Already auratic
for fans, these release dates became distribution events, and time itself became
a good for Potter fans, who like King’s Constant Readers, constituted an
audience whose intensity of devotion suited the desire for such
timeliness.
Amazon managed these operations beginning in 2000 through
a partnership with FedEx . The temporal urgency
of possession drove Potter fans to order 350,020 advance copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and the
success of that venture prompted Amazon to normalize the procedure for the
remaining novels in the series. Yet in the case of
Ur, the compression of time — itself a remediation of
the anticipation of waiting for one’s book — could not overcome readers’
dissatisfaction with Amazon’s mediation of King.
The overwhelming sense that the Kindle had stripped ownership from the act of
reading returned with greater force six months later, when copies of Orwell’s
1984 disappeared from several thousand Kindles
in July 2009. In the sixteen discussions on Amazon forums alone Kindle readers
took to the boards, writing to one another and to Amazon in ways that for the
most part mirrored media coverage of the incident. Like that coverage, Amazon
reader discourse regarded the deletion as an unjustifiable outrage, one that for
many warranted a boycott of the company. Even in the wake of Bezos’ apology,
which observed that the copies had been illegally published before calling their
removal
stupid, thoughtless, and
painfully out of line with our principles,
readers urged a return to
books and the view of reading implicit in that return
.
Bezos’ apology appeared in the Amazon Kindle forums on 23 July
2009 . The copyright on 1984 has not yet expired in the U.S. The copy of 1984 in question was made available by Mobile
Reference. That call for a return emerged, in other words, as a
refusal of Amazon, and a critique that the company had, in its failed
remediation of
1984, revealed its indifference to
the readerly subjects constituted by the Kindle. Those discussing Justin
Gawronski’s case felt variously about his claim that the deletion had lost his
annotations to the novel, but most agreed that his suit lodged the very real
objection that Kindle readers are defined most, and most unfortunately, by their
tenuous ownership of the texts they purchase.
For an
overview of the incident and Gawronski’s suit, see Student sues Amazon despite finding 1984
notes
.
Have I purchased
something
that I can have some reasonable expectation of permanent use,
wondered one poster,
Or have the
TOS dictated that it’s only mine as long as I remain a customer in good
standing with Amazon (and Amazon doesn't go bankrupt)?
. Contingency scripts this poster’s question,
marking the discrepancy between purchase and possession. It’s not surprising,
then, that in the aftermath readers imagined going back to bookstores — as one
put it,
Good chance to go to Border’s
and socialize
. Doing so not only reverses earlier claims that
virtual Kindle conversations would enhance readerly interaction but seeks to
relocate readerly self-possession in a space at once physical and social.
At the same time there was also a sense that this incident was to be expected,
that the fluidity of copyright in the almost-digital moment made possession
precisely a risky and fleeting prospect, and that the incident would measure
just how long-sighted Amazon was in its understanding of the future it had
brought to reading. For these reasons, commentary on the forums — less driven by
a personalized disappointment over the author/Amazon pairing that had yielded
Ur — concerned itself primarily with the
company, and in particular, with its management of relations with
reader-consumers. The discussion thread titles are on their own revealing for
they cite again and again Amazon as an agency possessed with a directness and
invisibility of action, the likes of which now highlighted the position from
which Amazon had operated as a model of distribution. The perceived discrepancy,
a kind of aporia illuminated by Kindle libraries suddenly bereft of their copies
of
1984, prompted readers to discuss what Amazon
could or should do to acknowledge and remedy the situation even as they
struggled to account for the intrusion in the first place. In all the furor,
however, the novel’s presence was unremarkable, appearing primarily as an iconic
analog for Amazon’s dystopic conduct. Caught up in the conversation about an
ownership undone, Amazon readers remediated
1984 in
the light of their Kindles, doing so by targeting Amazon as a direct and literal
referent. If King’s fictional Kindle led readers to comment on the corresponding
desires Amazon constructed for them, the erasure of
1984 made drawing the parallels between Big Brother and Amazon a
fitting, if not necessary, response. In this instance, Kindle-reading had
shifted the dynamic through which texts, themselves no less made than things,
articulate and critique the conditions of their production. For the turn to
analogic reading that these Kindled texts have inspired has as
its
focus what it means for reading to be so newly mediated.
A
Customer. Literal Bookburning in a world too like our
own. Post on Amazon.com Customer Reviews Fahrenheit 451. 10 June 1996. [http://www.amazon.com/Fahrenheit-451-Ray-Bradbury/product-reviews/0345342968
](http://www.amazon.com/Fahrenheit-451-Ray-Bradbury/product-reviews/0345342968).
A
Customer. Wonderful! Post on Amazon.com Customer
Reviews Fahrenheit 451. 16 September 1996. [http://www.amazon.com/Fahrenheit-451-Ray-Bradbury/product-
reviews/0345342968/ref=cm_cr_pr_top_link_141?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=141&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending](http://www.amazon.com/Fahrenheit-451-Ray-Bradbury/product-reviews/0345342968/ref=cm_cr_pr_top_link_141?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=141&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending).
A
Customer. Review of Ur. Post on Amazon.com Customer
Reviews Ur. 26 December 2010. [http://www.amazon.com/UR-ebook/product-reviews/B001RF3U9K/ref=cm_cr_pr_top_link_32?ie=UTF8&pageNumber=32&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending](http://www.amazon.com/UR-ebook/product-reviews/B001RF3U9K/ref=cm_cr_pr_top_link_32?ie=UTF8&pageNumber=32&s).
A
Customer. Review of Ur. Post on Amazon.com Customer
Reviews Ur. 15 May 2010.
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Amazon.com.
Introducing Amazon Kindle 2. Amazon.com Press
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Amazon.com. Toni Morrison discusses Amazon Kindle. Video on
Amazon.com. [http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/m1SMOFDCLT5DMB](http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/m1SMOFDCLT5DMB).
An
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UR. Post on Amazon.com Customer Reviews Ur. 29 March 2009. [http://www.amazon.com/UR-ebook/product-reviews/B001RF3U9K/ref=cm_cr_pr_top_link_33?ie=UTF8&pageNumber=33&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending](http://www.amazon.com/UR-ebook/product-reviews/B001RF3U9K/ref=cm_cr_pr_top_link_33?ie=UTF8&pageNumber=33&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending).
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Amazon.com Customer Reviews Fahrenheit 451. 28 June
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Wolfe, Alexander. Sci-Fi Shocker: Ray Bradbury Wrong on Future of Electronic
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