What's lost when all reading becomes private

I must have been about 3 years old when I first fell in love with books.

I still remember the moment it happened, too. My mom was on the phone with someone, and I was in the living room, ignored and annoyed with being ignored. I wanted to impress upon her the fact of my being ignored, so I picked up a Wishbone novel and flipped through it the way I had seen the grown-ups do it.

When I finished, I wandered over to my mom and held up the book I had just “read.” I was duly congratulated. Of course I hadn’t understood a damn thing about what was written down, but that wasn’t the point. That moment marked the first time the book became meaningful. It became a tool I could use to project myself onto others whenever I was in danger of being ignored or forgotten.

I’ve probably presented a dozen different arguments about why I don’t like eReaders. They pose a danger to trade paperback publishers, they have an awkward weight, they don’t carry out-of-prints, the font is too big, they’re not romantic, etc. But these are all secondhand arguments compared to the real reason I can’t abide electronic readers: they’re too personal. Strangers can’t see the title or the cover art or anything like that. When you read an eBook, you are completely alone with whatever it is you’re reading.
In essence, this is the ideal reading environment for things like “50 Shades of Grey” or any other pulpy, embarrassingly juvenile novels. Readers are free to maintain their private worlds in terminals and coffee shops without having to fear a judgmental passer-by.

But how we got it in our heads that reading was something that should be entirely personal, I’ll never know. My first experience with the book is testament to its multi-functionality in allowing the reader to enter into a private world while also enabling him to insert himself into a stranger’s. The book is a private world, but we can never forget they are also glorified icebreakers. Depriving that public passer-by of his judgment by hiding behind an eBook ultimately boils down to depriving him of his rightful opinion.
And then there are the aspects of cover art and the font-inflated titles, both of which are on the book for the sole purpose of outside viewership. Keeping all of this to oneself might very well constitute a kind of hoarding.

Of course, I say all of this as a very prejudiced reader. I’m not afraid of letting the passer-by see what I’m reading, because I make sure to read something impressive when I go out in public. I once flew to Dallas with a copy of Joyce’s “Ulysses” and four companion texts tucked in the crook of my arm. This was outstanding vanity on my part, but at the same time it was also an invitation for others to exercise their own vanity. Why fear outsider opinion when it is much easier to cater to it? An airport security man and a total stranger both stopped me to converse about their admiration for the Irish writer.

Needless to say, this wouldn’t have happened had I kept “Ulysses” as an eBook.