Sherman Alexie excoriates the Kindle at Book Expo
New book technologies and the effects of the ongoing recession dominated the headlines at last week-end's Book Expo America, the publishing industry's leading annual trade show and book fair at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City. It was the anti-corporatist remarks of one award winning author at the event, however, that ignited the most controversy and subsequent debate among writers on and off the world wide web.
Even as Google was unveiling plans to undercut corporate rival Amazon's Kindle in the emerging market for e-books by launching a new program that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books directly to consumers on any device with a web browser, and Amazon was touting its soon to be released Kindle DX ($459 retail) with its vaunted 16 shades of grayscale, National Book Award winning author Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) launched a minor insurgency both inside and outside the arena by calling the expensive reading devices "elitist" and claiming that their widespread adoption would harm both readers from poor communities and authors of all books other than bestsellers.
Mokoto Rich of The New York Timesreported that while on a panel of authors speaking primarily to a group of independent booksellers, Alexie denounced digital publishing in general and the Amazon Kindle in particular as "elitist", claimed that he had refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. In what was surely a misguided attempt at levity, he declared that when he spotted a woman in a nearby seat on his plane flight to New York reading from a Kindle, "I wanted to hit her."
Alexie has subsequently apologized for the gender insensitivity of his remark and admitted that five of his books are available for Kindle download as e-books from Amazon (though he claims to have sold a grand total of only 7 downloads). He has also conceded that e-books represent an important quality of life improvement to certain special needs users.
This hasn't spared him from the wrath some tech-savvy writers and bloggers, who have branded him as everything from a misinformed Luddite to a hypocrite with a penchant for pandering. No less passionate are those who support Alexie's position and doubt that a publishing industry controlled by a distribution system dominated by corporate giants like Amazon and Google will be all that friendly to dissident free expression or respectful of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution's privacy rights protections against illegal searches and seizures.
In follow-up interviews and on his official web site, ShermanAlexie.com, the author--who was born on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington and is best known for his books The Business of Fancydancing (poetry, 1991), The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (short stories, 1993), Indian Killer (novel, 1996) and the screenplay for the film Smoke Signals (1998)--stands behind his remarks about corporate domination of the e-books market, arguing it would virtually eliminate the commercial viability of independent, community bookstores in America.
If you've followed Alexie's career over the years or have ever had the opportunity to attend one of his live appearances--his two hour talk at Daemen College in Amherst in 2004 comes readily to mind--you'll understand that he has a proclivity for going "off message". As a longtime supporter of the interests of independent publishers and the national spokesperson for National Small Press Month, however, his advocacy has been remarkably cogent and focused.
Alexie's tirade against the Kindle may have been excessive, but his skepticism about universal access to books and ideas in the approaching era of digital publishing is well-founded. Much of "book culture" revolves around the materiality of the book as object. Think of book clubs, book signings, community book sales and reading groups and their role in giving literature a human face and building various communities. How does all that translate into a world of $400 e-book reading devices in which your entire digital library can be erased with two of three errant key strokes?
As the world commemorates the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing today, we in the United States who are about to hand Google Books a near monopoly in field of digital publishing need to remain mindful of how compliant Google has been in assisting the People's Republic of China in continuing to suppress information about the so-called "June 4th Incident" in China. There's no reason to think that given a similar perceived threat to national security, Google (or Amazon) wouldn't remove radical authors from distribution or share your reading list with the NSA or Department of Homeland Security here.
--R.D. Pohl
It does strike me that Google is gaining too much power. Another example are all the online photos of residential locations on Google map. Eventually there must be legislation to protect people's privacy. Will our reading list eventually be owned by big brother?
Long live the printed Paper book!
Posted by: visitor from the west coast | June 04, 2009 at 02:35 PM
Kindle will be obsolete long before the book finally dies at the hands of Google Books. Alexie is shooting at the wrong target. Google Books will end libraries, and when libraries are done, the publishers will die next. It'll be the end of print, except for a few well-heeled holdouts interested in BookArts and print-on-demand.
What's the point of owning a Kindle if no books are being published?
Posted by: Dan | June 04, 2009 at 02:52 PM