[Editor's Note: The following questions about E-Books & Kindles were accidently left out of Read Inc.'s interview with Christopher Moore. To read the remainder of the interview click here.]
eBU: What are you feelings on the Kindles and E-Books?
Christopher Moore: I bought an early Kindle and didn’t care for the experience, the biggest [issue] being that I need page numbers. I have 40-some years of remembering and finding things by page numbers, even when I’m working on a manuscript, to suddenly give me relative index numbers was just bullshit. I could never find stuff I wanted to look back on. I ended up buying every book I bought on a Kindle as a real, paper book. I haven’t had any experience with the iPad, yet. I don’t have one and have only looked at one book on my girlfriend’s. It didn’t have page numbers either. [But] it seemed easier to see than the Kindle.
Does it bother you that your Novels are being pirated because of this new technology?
Yes. I have one source of income: book sales. If piracy becomes too widespread, I will have to do something else for a living. I’m guessing I won’t have the time to write books as well.
What about your feelings at the time when Napster came around, did you pirate Music at the turn of the century?
Yes. I did. And I’m sure I rationalized it because I had bought almost everything I downloaded in vinyl, then much of it again in CD. It was still wrong. I have a number of rock star friends who are still touring well into their sixties, when they thought they would be able to live off of their record sales.(And would have, without downloading.) With music, at least, they have a performance model they can fall back on economically. Novelists don’t.
E-books in general make complete sense, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they signal the death of the novel. Our attention spans are being fragmented more every day, and I include my own in that. It’s harder to write novels now than it was ten years ago, fifteen years ago because there is so much stuff trying to grab your attention. So much information. To keep your head in one story for a year, maybe two or three, it’s tough. People are amazingly impatient.
I remember I was in the dentist chair for a long procedure the day the iPad came out, so I was about two hours late finding out that it was going to be called the “iPad”, which, so I immediately tweeted something about how I was going to wait for the iPad with wings. Someone replied with, “Oh, that would have been funny if the meme wasn’t so stale. Really, Chris, I expect more from you.” I know, beyond, “What an asshole!” It made me realize that there was no hope of being timely.
Information is so fast and comes in quantities and it has to self-specialize — that is, you can’t possibly keep up with anything, so you have to pick what you’ll keep up with. We are all connected and now comes the division. One can either pay attention to one thing, single-task, if you will, or be connected and achieve awesome shallowness in many arenas all at once. I don’t think the novel, as a form, is built for this world. E-books are just novels flopping on the shore, gasping for breath, trying to show that they are still alive, but they will be fossils in no time. It happens.
I actually asked Neil Stephenson about that at dinner a few years ago, and he may be the smartest guy I know. I said, “So Neal, what happens when E-books get Napsterized?” He said, exactly, “You and I are going to have to go work at Burger King or something until people realize that they have to pay for original content.” Sort of distilling the normal argument, that e-books will give an opportunity to so many more authors, but the quality of what you’ll be able to read will almost necessarily decline. Like I said, he’s the smartest guy I know, and that’s what he thinks. I guess I’ll go with that. Would you like fries with that?
It’s more optimistic than my take: “We’re all going to die homeless and alone in a cardboard box, cradling copies of our old remaindered books, soaked with our own urine.”
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[...] at Everything by Urban. What stuck me was the second part of the interview where he talks about E-books and Kindles and piracy. He seems to of the mindset that e-books will lead to rampant piracy and the decline of an [...]
This is really a great blog and I enjoyed the information given about My Favorite E – Books
I find it harder to “pirate” books with my Kindle. I used to be able to share my books with my friends who don’t have Kindle and now it’s now happening. I love my Kindle and won’t ever give it up. I got mine in Oct and have read 90 books so far.
I love Christopher Moore! I hope that we don’t loose the wonderful form of the novel in the future. I recognize the convenience of e books but for gifts, nothing beats the paper novel. Just gave one as a bday present last night. And gifting music, it’s so much nicer to give a CD with the notes and artwork than a CD or efile.
I’m not as concerned as most people here seem to be about being able to sniff, caress, and fondle a book’s papery goodness; my sexual fetishes simply don’t run that way, and it’s not why I read. I can’t see eBooks being popular until they manage to somehow replicate the /words/ in a book.
Oh, wait.
i love books and thought i would hate the kindle, but it turned out to be great. i now have an ipad and enjoy it as much as the kindle. for me, having all my books available is more valuable to me than the “feel” of a book. i also love highlighting passages and the ability to search wikipedia and google while reading, whether for a word or topic.
i personally don’t pirate books nor music, both for the same reason: to support the artist. because ebooks are cheaper 99% of the time, i think i actually buy more books now than i would normally.
the one thing i don’t like with ebooks is the inability to share a book. but if you think about it, sharing is actually a form of pirating. if you buy a paperback and lend it to 5 people, those others got to read it without having to pay. with ebooks, you can share PDFs or share with the Nook, but you are pretty limited with the Kindle unless you share your account.
(that being said, i have bought at least a dozen copies of Lamb for friends. freaking awesome story)
By your logic, libraries are pirating, also. Really??
I must agree with several of my fellow commenters, until the Kindle or iPad or whatever can replicate the feel of a book, and even more important, the smell of old paper, I’ll stick with the old school.
I have to say that I love printed books but I’m able to do far more pleasure reading when I’m able to just pull out my phone and read a couple pages while I’m in line at the store or outside on a smoke break at work. Much more convenient because I always have it with me anyway.
I was reluctant to purchase an ebook reader but then my wife purchased one for me a few years back. With my job I have to travel all the time and find flying with a bag full of books to be nearly impossible nowadays. With the Kindle I’m able to read a series of books and download the next book that comes out even when I’m stuck in the woods on some military installation. I believe the people that don’t want to roll with the times are the same people that don’t want to give up their VHS because they love the sound of the rewind button. Or the people that didn’t want to give up their cassette tapes because they enjoyed the wait while trying to fast forward to their favorite song. They are just reaching for an excuse because they don’t want to seem scared of new things. I will always purchase a new Christopher Moore book because I love meeting the man at book signing events and I want something for him to sign. Not that I wouldn’t like him to sign my Kindle, but I travel with it and don’t want to risk losing his autograph in some airport.
For me nothing compares to settling on the couch with a hot beverage, and a book, a paper book, the feel and smell of the pages, it’s the best.
You’re not going to believe this, but in Canada the Indigo and Chapter stores form just about the monopoly on bookstore chains and are owned by the same person. They offered a brand of e-book reader called Kobo, and offer 100 free Classic books pre-loaded.
…the trouble is, one of them is THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO by Karl Marx, just about the only non-fiction in the list. So Canadians get a mandatory Communist manual when they want to get an e-book reader? After Communism has killed 130 million people? What are they THINKING?
Its no more “mandatory” to read than any of the Dickens or Austen that you find on there, and its far from the only nonfiction work. You really had to work overtime at ignoring your surroundings to make them fit this particular conclusion.
I say you mandatorily get it in your pre-packaged, pre-loaded Kobo book-reader whether you want it or not. An EXTREMELY tendentious book in Canada. From Russian and Ukrainian immigrants to the Prairies to Chinese and Vietnamese currently, over 10% of Canadians are refugees from Communism or the descendents of same! And this is how Indigo/Chapters treats them!
If I buy a Kobo, I’ll be like, “I’ve got 99 books but the Commie ain’t one!”
Chris, just so you know, there is a world of us out here who may or may not use an e-reader sometimes but will never abandon THE BOOK! And we love you! You can find a community of us books nuts — young and, er, well-seasoned — at Goodreads.com, for example (where you really need to chime in and become a “goodreads author” btw). Just listen there to the support for your work and for books in general! As long as we have anything to say about it — and we do — the end of novel is NOT nigh. So there…
Love books, have thousands of the darn things. They’re so heavy though. I’m sure i’ve spent 1000′s of dolllars over the years hauling them around with me. I now read everything on an iPhone. The words are what really count. I’d rather pay the author than for shipping charges.
I am a book LOVER and knew that I would hate the Kindle. I bought it anyway, being pleasantly surprised. I have proceeded to purchase all the Christopher Moore books I can. I will also be buying them at B&N as actual books. I still need to feel the paper, know the page number, and use the previous pages for reference. Either way, I hope Christopher Moore is a round for a very long time. He’s unstoppable!
I will always buy a hard paper copy of Chris’s books and when he shows up at the book store in West Chester, PA for a signing I will always bring him some goodies from the bakery. Chris rocks. Someone please turn one of his books into a movie, I mean, common already!
YES! I’d love to see THE STUPIDEST ANGEL adapted to a movie — would that not be epic?!
I do hope you won’t have to work at Burger King, your books are so great !
If things get worse, maybe you can put them up for free on your own website, every week a new chapter or something. Then your site will get so much trafic Steve Jobs, AOL and Microsoft will start bidding wars to buy it.
There’s one good thing about e-books though, it means we can buy the books we want anywhere in the world. Up here in Switzerland it’s pretty hard to find english books in the regular bookshops. They never seem to stock the ones I’m looking for…
I don’t think you should be too worried. Everyone I know and I agree that, for one reason or another, books on screen just don’t compare to books in print.
Besides, the only people I’ve ever even seen with a kindle have one as a status symbol, not an actual reading implement. 140 bucks just for the platform? No thanks.
I’m in total agreement with Chris. I’m not a fan of e-readers because you can’t roll one up in your hand, you can’t feel the dry page on your fingertips, and you can’t read it so many times that the cover becomes dog-eared and warped. Not to mention, it’s hard to lend, or give, e-books to good friends. Personally, I would rather live in a house with a million books, than to be able to store two million in the palm of my hand. I hate to imagine a world without books in it. Too 451 for me .
So… The ability to have all of the books in existence (hyperbole for now, perhaps) in the palm of your hand, at your very fingertips when you want to read one, is too “451″ (as in ‘Fahrenheit 451′, I’m assuming)? How so? Physical libraries are easy to eliminate. Digital collections are much harder, but only if the books are available without DRM. A mass book-burning is so much more symbolic than a mass deleting.
That said, I love my physical books as much as I love my digital books. I’ve bought every one of Christopher’s books in paper-format. Four of them hardcover because I couldn’t wait. He’s up in my top five favorite authors of all time. It makes me sad to see that his opinion on digital books and book readers and mine are so different.