Ebook Foreplay

My bookshelves are sprinkled with unread books – some more than a decade old – that I will some day sit down and read. It doesn’t matter that it’s been a decade – when I’m ready to read, I can sit down, re-read the synopsis, run my hands over the cover as I connect the images to the plot, and prepare myself for what I’m about to experience. It’s literary foreplay – and until I got an ereader, I didn’t even realize that it happened.

These days I have a Nook, and I love it – in fact, it’s nothing short of awesome: it’s light; I can turn pages with one hand on a crowded subway (or at a meal); and when I’m tired/bored/over a book at any given moment, I can just get another one. It’s all so easy and convenient.

But I never thought about how ebooks lose their context – once you buy the book and open it on your ereader, there’s no cover, no summary, nothing to help with the transition. For example, I bought Yann Martel’s new novel Beatrice and Virgil a few weeks ago, having loved Life of Pi. I’d read the summary when I bought it (I think?), but three weeks later, I had no idea what this book what going to be about. Next thing I know, I’m reading a book about a taxidermist and a pear.

This seems to exemplify the ebook experience in general. I’ve started wildly impulse buying eBooks all day long at work as I am on our site, and then a few weeks later when I’m ready to read, there’s no context for the purchase. I feel as though I am blindly jumping off a cliff into the middle of a story. I don’t dislike it… It’s just different and a bit disorienting – slightly disorienting, unexpectedly adventurous.

I suppose an easy solution is to go back online and re-read the summary, etc., before starting the ebook, but sometimes, that just can’t happen. Sometimes, I am squished like a sardine on the subway with only one hand free and no wifi, so all I can do is jump off the cliff and see what happens.