Dusting my bookshelves this weekend, I came across a couple of Georges Simenon titles, Dirty Snow and Three Rooms in Manhattan. I love those books, I think to myself. Maybe I should put them on my iPhone as calculated additions to the permanent ambulatory library in my pocket.

But the thought of a library always at my beck and call got me thinking about all the books I’ve read because there was nothing else to read. The Thorn Birds, for example. Or, out of the same isolated bookshelf, Jane Goodall’s My Life with the Chimpanzees and William Burroughs’ Factotum. (How those three books ended up in the same small library in a house with a bed, a garden, and two enormous doors is provoking, wouldn’t you say?)

There was the year spent teaching English to fifth and sixth graders. I was not in India, but the only English books happened to be Kipling’s collected works in pocket-sized hardcover. And there was my mother’s house one summer, broke, and Dickens. Or an ornamental Jane Eyre from a leather-bound collection of classics bought on subscription by my great-grandmother. No one had ever read any of them and I had to dig up a letter opener to slice the pages apart. It was terribly romantic.

So, here’s the question: Would I have read Jane Eyre at some point later in life if it hadn’t been in the glass-fronted bookcases of my home? Maybe. Although, it has never been required in any course I’ve taken. No one has ever recommended it or handed me a copy. (So sad.) And it’s not a book I recall seeing on jungle bookshelves (I do, however, remember a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita in a Maryknoll mission in Guatemala) or foreign language school bookshelves. If, at the age of twelve, I’d been offered the choice between Jane Eyre and, say, a contemporary equivalent to Twilight would I have chosen the former? Would my son be reading the Economist Book of Obituaries if it weren’t the only thing in print in the bathroom?

Interesting to ponder, the pros and cons of having everything you ever wanted. It’s hard to be critical of choice when the other option is totalitarian; on the other hand, necessity can make for strange and wonderful book choices.

I am totally predictable in the mornings. I make coffee, turn on CNN, drink juice, scan the night’s email. When the coffee’s ready, I go to the New York Times online. There’s a whole litany of sites that follow: Slate’s news wrap, the Daily Beast for fun, the Guardian for books. . . but this morning I got no further than the news item that Amazon was offering a free Kindle app for iPhones. Way before 7 AM I downloaded it. Zip, zip.

There’s a button on the top of the app that says “Get Books.” Press it and you’re told to go to the Amazon/Kindle website. I did this, on my iPhone. Now, what book do I want?

My first choice was a novel called Adiós, Hemingway because a friend recommended it. Nope, they didn’t have it. Although that wasn’t terribly unexpected, it threw me for a loop. You don’t know me, but you must realize that I work for a book review magazine. On any given day, there are hundreds of books all over the floor of my office. At home, there’s a Post Office box next to the door full of books I’ve taken the time to read a chapter or two of, and discarded. On the shelves there are four generations of books read and saved and reread. I don’t have enough room to keep books that won’t be reread. How many books are up there? I don’t know the number but I know what I’ve got.

And I also know what I don’t need, what I’m not interested in spending $9.99 on, the going-price of most books in the Kindle store. I mean, I like to read mysteries as much as anyone, but $9.99 seems a wasteful, selfish amount to spend on a non-tangible, one-time-only book. At least if I buy the hardcopy, I can give it away to someone, and they can give it away to someone.

So what would I spend $9.99 on? Something I’d like to keep with me. A reference. For example, a few weeks ago I splurged on the Oxford American Dictionary app for my iPhone. I love it. I use it every day. Surely there must be something else, maybe something I’ve got in my library.

I get up with my coffee and stand in front of my bookshelves for a bit—what would be something more useful than Google to keep on my phone?

How about John Emsley’s Nature’s Building Blocks? That’d be fun. I key in the name. Nope. Sorry. There’s a book by John Emsley (same guy?) called The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison, and there’s also one (same guy) called Vanity, Vitality, & Virility: The Science Behind the Products You Love to Buy, but I’m not buying.

Okay, how about The Oxford Book of Military History. That could be useful for when I’m in waiting rooms filled with Good Housekeeping magazines. I key in the name. Nope. There’s U.S. Military History for Dummies (never understood why anyone would buy those books), and there are really odd (and suspicious) titles like The Art of Insurgency: American Military Policy & the Failure of Strategy in Southeast Asia. Who’s reading that, and where? Or even stranger, Marching Under Darkening Skies: The American Military & the Impending Urban Ops Threat. Wow. Are Special Forces guys with Kindles killing time reading this stuff in the field?

It’s getting pretty late by now. I need to get dressed and go to work. What am I going to do? All right, let’s just key in “Oxford” and see what comes up.

Lots. All sorts of weird “handbooks” on oncology, international relations, ethical theory. . . Wait! Here’s something. How about The Dictionary of Modern Quotations? That’d work. That’d be useful and fun. $9.99.

I hit the “one click” button and since I’ve already signed up for the app, Amazon recognizes my device. Apparently, if you have both a Kindle and an iPhone, your purchases will upload to both and will keep track of where you are in your readings no matter which device you use.

The WiFi at my house wasn’t working this morning, and there’s no 3G network in northern Michigan. Even so, it only took a couple of minutes for the book to show up in the Kindle app. I was immediately amused that the familiar Oxford font shows up on my phone. And the table of contents is a series of links—that’s good. Let’s try “Last Words.”

1    Bugger Bogner.

King George V. (1865 – 1936) on his deathbed in 1936, when someone remarked ‘Cheer up, your Majesty, you will soon be at Bognor again’; alternatively, a comment made in 1929, when it was proposed that the town be named Bognor Regis on account of the king’s convalescence there after a serious illness
K. Rose King George V (1983); see Last Words 190:5


I’d call this a success, wouldn’t you?

I was intrigued the other day by the announcement that Grove/Atlantic was releasing Mike Lawson’s new book digitally, through DailyLit.com, two months ahead of its bookstore appearance.

First of all, I went to check out DailyLit. Here’s what they say about themselves:

We got the idea for DailyLit after the New York Times serialized a few classic works in special supplements a few summers ago. We wound up reading books that we had always meant to simply by virtue of making them part of our daily routine of reading the newspaper. The only thing we do more consistently than read the paper is read email. Bingo!

DailyLit sends books in installments via e-mail or RSS feed. We currently offer over 750 classic and contemporary books available entirely for free or on a Pay-Per-Read basis (with sample installments available for free). You can read your installments wherever you receive e-mail/RSS feeds, including on your Blackberry and iPhone.

DailyLit allows you to schedule the time of arrival of your installments (you can also click on a link to download more immediately), and each installment takes under five minutes to read.

Under five minutes to read.

I’ll come back to this in a minute, but first I want to say that although I’ve read less than ten minutes of Mike Lawson, it’s pretty clear that he’s an airport read. I’ve got absolutely nothing against airport reads—in fact, the $9.95 price tag, the absence of the extra weight in my carry-on, and the sparing of a tree combine to make a convincing package, I think. Except for this one thing:

Under five minutes to read.

Until they give away Wi-Fi in airports and aboard planes, I can’t keep clicking on the re-load button every couple of minutes. (This could be solved with an option to download 10, 20, 100, etc. pages.)

Then I got to wondering if a Mike Lawson-type book could be had anywhere else. I went to Barnes & Noble first, keyed in “ebooks,” and got this message:

Our eBooks Store is Closed.
B&N.com no longer sells or provides support for eBooks. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

I’m not terribly inconvenienced (there are always options on the net), so I wondered if it was really B&N that was inconvenienced about how to price and distribute ebooks.

Next stop, Amazon. Okay, they have lots and lots of selection, but only if I own a Kindle, which I don’t. I have an iPod Touch. And I have actually read books on it, not to mention the papers every day but Sunday.

My favorite site for the Touch is TextOnPhone.com. Yes, it’s also exclusive – only for the iPhone and Touch. It’s also free, and I can make a reading list to dip in and out of. Short stories work the best for this. TextOnPhone allows me to download in 4-page segments, and up to 50 pages at a time. I can, however, download several 50-page segments at once if I’m planning to be off the Wi-Fi for a while. I can also choose the font and size for best reading.

My last research operation was to price a book at several different sites. Here are the least expensive options for The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

DailyLit – Free
Barnes & Noble - Unavailable
Amazon - $2.97
TextOnPhone – Free
ebooks.com (MicroSoft, Mobi and Adobe readers only) - $5.95
Project Gutenberg – Free

Hmmm. What do you think?