The Depthless Bookshelf

It’s still a new thing to have book-shaped readers for reading books—new on all sides. For readers (the people), what feels new is obvious. And for reader-makers, what probably feels new is that devices have gotten so fine, have retreated so far back into the quotidian world, that they now have a reason to share real estate with the grungy objects they outmoded. They cover everything, so they cover books. (And, hey, remember books?)

The advertisers for the iPad, Kindle, and other reading devices are in a strange spot, forced either to sell readers on readers (who thought they were the readers) or to tell everyone else why books are grand. And they have responded, in a sense, in kind: with a series of strange spots. Apple runs an ad on its website starring the reading experience (a mom reads Winnie-the-Pooh to her child, and we see some mommish titles socked away for later). In Amazon’s stop-motion TV commercials, twee pop plays as silent Kindle-holding characters are swamped repeatedly—almost worryingly—by costumes and high jinks: raw bookstuffs. And in the New York Times Book Review, newsprint ads struggle to cobble together the resolution to show just how ­legibly this ­electronic device ­renders print.

One theme is common to all the ads: No one can grip either device naturally. The actors handle them more like scrolls (certainly Steve Jobs does, in his initial presentation of the iPad, as he pulls up Ted Kennedy’s True Compass). And for Jobs and the rest, the reading looks oddly oracular. They peer at the devices formally, expectantly. It is as if the e-reader will not so much behave as a book but predict the future of books.

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They peer at the devices, and the devices peer back. In the iPad’s world, everything has been turned to greet us. “The iBooks app opens to a beautiful bookshelf,” the mom’s voice announces in Apple’s web ad. Too dark to be pine, the shelf appears to be made of walnut, and her description is fair: there is nothing not beautiful about it. But it’s also a strange platform: it looks to be no more than a few inches deep, and—as if to accommodate that design flaw—all the books are facing out. Fully frontal, they appear a bit abashed; they are grudging conscripts in all this. It’s as though they’ve been forced to trade their slim, sidelong seduction for a kind of literary flashing. “Good morning,” they seem to say gloomily, much like Eeyore, whose words are intoned at the beginning of the ad: Winnie-the-Pooh sits on the top left of the beautiful bookshelf.

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