TNR vs Kindle
TNR gets taken down a peg by Ann Althouse over the snobbery and sexism that it displays in its anti-Kindle editorial
Althouse: I get pissed off at TNR.
The breathless, Bezos-loving man from Newsweek says that he is reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson on his iPhone. No, he isn’t. All reading is not the same. It takes more than the apparition of words to constitute a book and its inner forms.
No, you’re not a snob. Oh, no, no, no.
There is a kernel of a point in TNR’s rant: there are sensual enjoyments in reading physical books that are not reproduced when you read electronic versions. But to say that reading Life of Johnson on an iPhone isn’t really reading Life of Johnson is the stupidest thing I’ve read all month, possibly all year. And, really, unless you’re the type of person who will sit down and spend hours leafing through a book written in a script you can’t even decipher, I’d suggest that even if you believe strongly in the weaker version of the claim, you’re probably overrating the sensual enjoyment of handling books just because up until now it’s always occurred in conjunction with the extremely pleasurable experience of reading. I’d bet that there are hardly any people, among the vast numbers who find reading a chore, who nonetheless really enjoy handling a book. I’d further bet that if the form-factor of the Kindle lasted long enough that people grew up reading on it and associating the very act of reading with handling it (admittedly doubtful) in the future we could look forward to paeans praising the sensual enjoyments of the lightness of the tablet and the satisfying clicking of the thumb-button.As to TNR’s sexism (which occurs later on in the editorial), I don’t really have anything to add to what Althouse says, except to say she certainly seems to have a point.