The Letter E. (Or, What Makes a Book?)

So there's this annoying little letter we have used on the webernet since, gosh, it seems like just about forever ago. It's a vowel, a familiar and friendly letter that I've now used six times (now seven, nine, ten, eleven, fourteen?) in this sentence alone. It serves as an identifier, a precursor to seemingly all-things-web. It's the great differentiator between that which is "real" and that which is "electronic."

That's right, I'm talking about "e."

"E-book" should be the e-word for 2007, what with the Kindle virtually flying off Amazon's e-shelves and stirring e-buzz around the e-universe to fe-e-ver pitch (sorr-e about that one). And with e-book sales proudly boasting a larger month-to-month increase over any "real" book category in October 2007 -- even before Kindle went to market -- it's certainly the thing to watch in publishing.

But there's something about that "e" that makes it feel less than. Maybe it's the lower-caseness of it, or the confusion over whether to hyphenise (eBook, e-book, E-Book?), but it seems somehow diminutive. But a book is a book is a book, ins't it? Whether it's paperback or hardcover or audio book (which we don't call an a-book, last I checked) -- it's still a book, right? You almost get the feeling that "e-book" should always be prefaced by the word "just" (Oh, you're a writer? What have you written? ...Nothing, really. Just an e-book.). So why do we make an effort to belittle the electronic book with that bothersome little "e"?

I think there are a few things, including an annoying human tendency to lump things into broad-sweeping and easily identifiable -- even if inaccurate -- categories (mammals, fruit, jazz, postmodernism, &tc). But primarily, I think, it's our inability (still!) to consider that which is on the web to be as effective, definitive, or accurate as what's on paper. Considering that each of us chats and/or sends messages via the internet with much greater frequency than we send letters or make phone calls, and that more of us consult Wikipedia and dictionary.com than their paper predecessors, one would think that we could get over it and finally give web-based media the credit it's due.

But for many, it's still this little thing on the side. The New York Times print edition is still, by way of some impractical orthodoxy, important to people. Watching appointment television via the low-grade analog spectrum is still unbelievably common. A popular blog can boast 10 times the readership of an "established" magazine of the same genre, but, you know, it's still just a blog.

So what makes a book a book? Is it, as many Gatherers have argued, the soft, tactile feel of the pages and the familiar smell of ink-on-paper? If that's the case, then what of you authors who have only published short stores or poems online? Are you e-authors, or e-poets? What about the time I listened to Stanley Tucci read the audio version of Breakfast of Champions? Was that not a book; did I not comprehend the full depth of Vonnegut's satire without the accompaniment of the page's swishing turn?

I may get e-strung up for this, but I would argue that what makes a book is not the binding, the paper, or what our tertiary senses discern from the experience. What makes a book is merely that the contents of it exist and that they are consumed by whatever method the reader chooses.

So as we wade through our respective quandaries of paper into the bright, digital future of 2008, I want to make this call to action: either start referring to all books by the letter best representing their published format (p-book for paperback, a-book for audio, P.U.-book for pop-up, &tc) or to level the playing field and call an "electronic" book what it really is: a book.

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Chris is an e-writer, an e-editor, and an e-business
guy with e-skills, with which he e-pays the e-bills.