Or, actually, what’s wrong with e-book readers in general? The Kindle is the one e-book reader that I have real experience with, so that’s the one I’ll be talking about. I think these are fundamental flaws in the platform, because aside from these problems, the Kindle is a nearly flawless device.

The point at the end here is that I don’t think I can switch to reading just, or mainly, on the Kindle. I want paper books. True, reading Anathem on the Kindle was awesome: I didn’t need to tote around that thousand-page behemoth just to read it. Even the delivery mechanism for books you buy — over the cell network, largely indistinguishable from magic — is perfect.

But there are flaws, and fatal ones. These are they:

• OCR and formatt1ng errors. This irritates me to no end. Many books I’ve read on the Kindle have odd, random formatting and transcription errors in the text that I find way too distracting. Print errors are, oddly, less of a problem in my eyes: there is some kind of heartlessness in the errors that crop up only in a digital version that doesn’t exist in ink-and-paper versions. And I know it’s hard work to convert a book from its paper form (if that’s the primary form of the book, meaning, older works) to a pristine digital one, but for some books it looks like zero effort actually went into it — they fed a book into a machine, got text out the other end, and called it a day.

• It’s too conspicuous. This may be what you want — you’d like people to take notice that you have a slick looking, highly portable, and (yes) expensive device that you read your books on. Or you might just want to sit and read, and not have the mechanism you’re reading with prompt any attention at all. This has happened a lot while I’ve been reading my Kindle in public. People ask if that’s a Kindle I have, or simply ask what is that, and anything I can say to them carries no weight or meaning other than my general satisfaction with my purchase, and that I find it a marvel of technology. “Hey this is neat and convenient” carries so much less weight than “Dostoyevsky really captures human plight and morality with the Karamazovs.” I mean, srsly. Also leave me alone, I’m trying to read.

• There is no cover. Which follows from the previous point. There is no way for anyone to tell what you are reading, unless they get a close look at the screen. There’s a social part about reading, if you’re doing it in public. You might be trying to draw attention via what you’re reading, but even if you aren’t, people are still curious. I am. When I see someone reading a book, I instinctively look at the cover, to see what book it is. I don’t approach people about them — though I almost did when that girl was reading Gravity’s Rainbow across from me, I mean, jeez — but I’m still curious and I know other people are too. Saying to everyone “look at me and my inhuman device” doesn’t carry the same weight as “I am reading your favorite author, so you have some insight into my inner world, and I, unwittingly, have insight into yours.”

• It’s an expensive piece of equipment you have to worry about. Leaving a $6 (or used, as low as $1 — just today I bought the Dune trilogy used for a whopping $3. And it’s the same edition that I first read the Dune books, so the cover and the text and the paper is the same as I remember, so there is a big nostalgia component to this too) paperback on a table in a café is something you can do with no problem. If someone steals your book, you’re out the book, and where you were in the book. If someone steals your Kindle, you’re out like $300.

• No page flipping. You can’t read something like Infinite Jest on this device, period. Other books also benefit from flipping back and forth, and it’s possible to do this on the Kindle, but just plain less easy to do so. A natural, automatic way of doing things now requires learning your way around a computer interface. It just doesn’t work.

• It’s plain inhuman feeling. If you just want to read, alone in your home, the Kindle is an effective way to do it. It doesn’t waste paper and you can have nearly any book you want immediately. If you want your reading to be a part of your life, the Kindle doesn’t fit.

So that’s it. The Kindle is a flawless device, but wholly unusable for it’s purpose.

So, I had an idea for a short fiction story, which might turn into a long fiction story, who knows, and I was writing a passage of it in Apple Pages, and tried turning a word italic. Like you do in any word processor, every day. For some reason, turning that word italic made the sentence before it (because of some fucking buggy page layout logic, I’m sure) become laid out in a single letter column. I mean, it looked
l
i
k
e

t
h
i
s
.

I’m not shitting you. And it crashed on top of that, so I lost half the paragraph I was working on. So I’m trying my damndest now just to make some fucking text italic, and now I can’t remember what it was I wanted to write, and got inspired to write, sitting here alone in a cabin in the woods.

This should be a central law of software engineering, and I don’t know if it’s been coined before now, but

If your software has a bug that prevents the most trivial-seeming thing from happening, that bug will consume someone’s attention, and because of that they will fail to accomplish things with your software.