Franzen's e-book rant

Jonathan Franzen's recent rant against e-books is reminiscent of a scene is his latest novel, Freedom. College student Jessica Berglund accuses her father's assistant Lalitha of not understanding how young people communicate—they've moved on from email to instant messaging and texts. Lalitha, at age 27, is now too old to get it, claims Jessica. When it comes to e-books, it seems that it's Franzen who just doesn't get it, although I wonder if he simply takes pleasure in stirring the pot.

Franzen believes the permanence of printed books preserves the author's vision for posterity. I like printed books because they wear and age. They've lived a life and are the more beautiful for it. But these days I prefer to buy novels as e-books and music or films on iTunes. That's because I have long run out of shelf space. Certainly, e-books in their current form have disadvantages but they have clear benefits too. My mother, for example, has set up her Kindle for large print. When my e-reader broke, I bought a new one and it had all the e-books I'd already bought on it. The device is nothing more than a facilitator.

E-books' chief advantage is distribution. Some books don't move enough copies to justify keeping them in print (or for booksellers to keep them in stock). E-books don't require significant storage space, just a few megabytes on a server. Large computing platforms can reduce the marginal cost of storing and distributing digital media to almost nil, meaning it is no longer bad business to carry less popular items. Franzen should try buying American paperbacks outside his own continent. I once ran a book club in the Middle East; we had to ship most of our paperbacks from Amazon UK.

Books are worthless if no one can read them. Mass distribution keeps titles alive long beyond their lifespan in the public consciousness. Google is busy scanning rare, out of print books (some out of copyright, others not). Project Gutenberg hosts free, out of copyright e-books—many of Amazon's free e-book classics derive from the hard work of Gutenberg's volunteers. Incidentally, Project Gutenberg is named after the inventor of the printing press, which transformed the sharing of knowledge and from which Franzen has benefited. There were, no doubt, plenty of medieval Franzens, who believed there was no substitute for a good handwritten parchment kept in few expensively-maintained libraries.

Franzen may want us to buy his paperback because he wants to be remembered, to have us possess something that is forever Jonathan Franzen. For an author's ego, e-books may feel more transient: I can click a button and suddenly Freedom is replaced by another writer's work. But e-books won't kill off printed books because both formats have their distinct advantages.

The magic of a book lies not in the print on the page, it lies in their words. In Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451, the state is almost successful in its plan to destroy all books. However, it fails to reckon with someone preserving their contents in his memory. I read Freedom on my Kindle. If Franzen really believes what he said, he shouldn't have let his book be available on it.