Make the language just right
Thomas Jones · Franzen's Homily
Jonathan Franzen's homily on the trouble with ebooks and the superiority of print has zapped its way around the world from the Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia (the Telegraph’s showbusiness editor has the full story):
Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough.
I can, up to a point, see where he's coming from. Alongside the paperbacks doublestacked on my shelves that I'm oddly reluctant to throw out but would happily consign to the memory card of a Kindle (most of Ian McEwan’s novels, for example) there are books that I value for all sorts of more or less sentimental reasons, from editions that my grandparents bought in the 1930s – a crumbling Ulysses, a copy of Ash Wednesday with a postcard my grandmother sent my grandfather before they were married tucked inside, a first edition of Auden's 'Spain' (hardly a book, but still) – to a rare first UK edition of Franzen's Freedom, thousands of copies of which had to be pulped (delete that, change that, move it around) because it was based on the wrong draft of the novel and full of mistakes.
Comments
In addition there are the obvious environmental benefits in production, transportation and storage. The increased potential for self-publishing and a more democratic literary world are already emerging.
A major argument for books is that it gives people like Phillip Larkin a place to earn a living. There are thousands of gentle people working in book shops, helping other people to find a suitable read for Uncle Will for his birthday. Do you want them all to lose their jobs? Book shops are one of the reasons to be cheerful in this dire age and don't you forget it.
At the same time, formatting textbooks for ebook readers has proven to be a really tough problem, even for amazon. It's not pleasant to read a PDF even on the Kindle DX's 10 inch screen; in the standard issue Kindle it's totally discouraging. And it gets worse if the ebook has foreign language text. I was checking out a Routledge Russian grammar book, re-edited barely two years ago, and half the reviews were pouring flaming scorn on the Kindle edition. It seems the geniuses at amazon didn't implement Unicode, a multi lingual text encoding standard that has been around for more than two decades... Reminds me of the late Saint Steve of Cupertino, California refusing to allow Adobe Flash on the iOS.
Philip Larkin worked as a librarian at the University of Hull, and there was nothing in my post to suggest that physical libraries should be liquidated.
The decline of the independent bookshop began long before the rise of the Kindle. The huge chains have made browsing rather a dreary exercise, as the choice of stock is mandated by head office and thus dominated by best-sellers; the quantity of backcopies is limited to non-existent. Finding a 'gentle' person to advise you about a book for Uncle Will has become a vain quest; paying for your book has became the only time you are sure to see a member of the shop's staff. Versions of the LRB shop in London are now rare, alas, and this has much more to do with the logic of big business rather than march of technology.
No luck. My colleague was using a computer made by the aforementioned Saint Steve of Cupertino, and the Czech alphabet was nowhere to be found. Mr Gates' merry men make it easy on my machine to use the correct alphabet. Maybe German ultra-nationalists have influence we did not know.
http://czech.typeit.org/
Then copying and pasting it on the email or Word file, etc.. If it is a Mac laptop or tower, I don't think there will be any trouble, as the OS X has been using unicode since its inception, which means it can handle the Czech alphabet. I don't know if it will work with an iPad or iPhone.
If he/she uses the alphabet quite a lot, then it is better to follow the instructions here under the "OS X extended keyboard" section:
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/czechslovak.html
Ash-Wednesday