Amazon just sent me an email, something that happens without my response several times a week.

But this one caught my attention. Here is the link to an offer I couldn’t refuse: an electronic copy of this book: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron, author of The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice.

William Styron, Wikipedia photo

Buying electronic books is so seductive even at the usual $9.99-12.99 price. It takes less than a minute to locate, buy, and possess a book when you use a Kindle or Nook or iPad. But at $1.49/book I am powerless to withstand Amazon’s wiles.

Amazon says it will offer a new Kindle bargain book every day. I wonder why they chose this one to inaugurate the daily specials. Or have they been doing this before and I just didn’t notice because of my laser focus on memoir??

Anyway, folks, I thought I had to share. Even used books for $.01 on Amazon end up costing $4.00. You won’t beat this price, and if Amazon keeps doing this, I will build my memoir collection on Kindle even if I can’t read them all for a long time.

If you decide to download, you must do so within 24 hours. Please let us know what your experience is. Do you own a Kindle or other electronic reader? What do you like or not like about reading this way? If you are considering a purchase of a reader, you might find this previous post helpful. Maybe you have already read the book and want to give us a mini-review. That would be wonderful also! Please comment below.

If you also love memoir–either reading, writing, or both–please subscribe to this blog in the easy-peasy box on the right hand side. You’ll find almost 300 blog posts archived here to help you find all kinds of treasures.

Since I spent 28 years interacting with undergraduates at Goshen College, I love encountering them and hearing about their lives. Several of them commented on the review of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress I wrote back in 2009.

One former student with whom I corresponded recently reflected on why he loved the book. He thought it might have something to do with the fact that he heard it read by professional readers as an audio book rather than read it as text.

In his own words: “One thing that occurs to me is that my consumption of the book as an audiotape listener (on the Indiana and Ohio turnpikes at that!) shaped my “reading” experience, making me especially receptive I think to the book’s transgressive humor and its pathos.  It was only several weeks later that I actually saw for the first time in a bookstore a copy of the actual paper and ink book.  I wonder how I would have experienced the book if I had read it in the traditional way, turning pages, thinking about the words in print, and all.”

Isn’t that a fascinating thought? Context is always an important part of experience, and we are affected differently by the sound of the human voice, especially a well-trained voice that resonates well with us. Some of us might also be more susceptible to sense impressions via our ears than via our eyes.

I usually read memoir as “book-books” as opposed to audio books or ebooks, although I own (and reviewed) a Kindle and use it occasionally (usually when I want to read a book immediately and save a trip to the store or a few days in the mail).

Do you enjoy all three kinds of books?  What difference do you experience in any one of the following?  

Tone. Tangibility. Durabilty. Searchability. Portability.

Do you have a favorite way to read? Have you ever “read” a book both as audio and text? Were the experiences different?

As promised previously, I will describe not only what I learned from reading the book but also from reading it on the Kindle. First, the content, then the form.

You would think a book that consists mostly of plot summaries and catalogs of other books could be deadly dull. I admit that there were a few times I skimmed past pages filled mostly with book titles. But the author’s own enthusiasm for his discoveries (previous books describing memoirs in a certain period and privileged information about sales numbers) and his spritely style kept me thoroughly engaged.

The structure, which includes both British and American works over centuries of time interspersed by a short summary of contemporary theory, and a conclusion that lists all memoirists and autobiographers, serves its purpose well. Yagoda has written the definitive research companion for those of us fascinated as much by the popularity of the genre as by individual memoirs.

Here are some gems gleaned from the book:

“As for fiction . . .it’s hard to find an important American novel that’s not some variation on a memoir.”

“Autobiography more than any other genre, trades on its authenticity and credibility. If those qualities are understood to be lacking in a memoir, why would anyone possibly take it seriously or even bother to read it?”

“In experiment after experiment, study after study, subsequent phychologists have gone a good deal farther, establishing that memory is by nature untrustworthy: contaminated not merely by gaps, but by distortions and fabrications that inevitably and blamelessly creep into it.  It is itself a creative writer, cobbling together ‘actual’ memories, beliefs about the world, cues from a variety of sources, and memories of previous memories to plausibly imagine what might have been, and then, in a master stroke, packing this scenario to the mind as the real one.”

“C.S. Barclay has observed that most of our autobiographical memories are ‘reconstructions aimed at preserving the essential integrity’ of our sense of ourselves and our histories. They are, he wrote, largely ‘true but inaccurate.’”

Psychologist Daniel Schacter in his book The Seven Sins of Memory identifies five persistent memory biases:

“Consistency and change biases show how our theories about ourselves can lead us to reconstruct the past as overly similar to or different from, the present. Hindsight biases reveal that recollections of past events are filtered by current knowledge. Egocentric biases illustrate the powerful role of the self in orchestrating perceptions and memories of reality. And stereotypical biases demonstrate how generic memories shape interpretations of the world, even when we are unaware of their existence or influence.”

“In fact, there is an inherent and irresolvable conflict between the capabilities of memory and the demands of narrative. The latter demands specifics; the former is really bad at them.”

Yagoda describes humorist memoirists from Twain to Sedaris who have created an enormously influential voice of “near-nuclear power of a self-deprecating narrator deploying hyperbole based on shrewd and perceptive observation.”

1854 illustrates the difference between American and English traditions in memoir because it is the date when two contrasting memoirs were published–P.T. Barnum’s (the self-promoter) and John Stuart Mill (who stipulated that his memoirs be published only after his death).

For me, the section on memory itself, from which most of the quotes above come, and the section on the American memoir craze of the 1950′s, with its rosy contrast to today’s “misery memoirs” were most telling. Also, every age in which memoir is popular becomes an age in which memoir-bashing becomes an indoor sport also. Anyone who aspires to understand his or her own life inside the spirit of the age needs to read this book.

Now, a word about the process of reading and reviewing from a Kindle copy of a book.

Strengths:

1. I can search the text! Once, I wanted to find a reference to Mary Karr.  All I had to do was go to Menu, type in the name, and locate the four places where it appears. I could go to anyone of the four by moving the cursor.

2. I was able to underline portions as I read.  Then, in order to share them here, I could locate them and type them out.

Weaknesses:

1. A good index at the back of a hard copy book can serve the same purpose as a searchable text.

2. Navigation in the highlights is pretty “clunky” while still serving as an improvement over flipping back through many pages of underlining.

Bottom Line: I recommend the book in any form. And I think I will find the electronic copy adequate to my needs. So, I guess the Kindle gets a thumbs up too!

Today I got out my six-month-old Kindle and spent 20 seconds ordering the two books–Mary Karr’s Lit and Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History. These are books #5 and #6 I have ordered.  I now have a library of about 15 titles, including some free ones, on my Kindle.

This Christmas season Amazon announced that electronic books have outsold hard copy books for the first time.  I am beginning to understand why. While I still love to hold a single book in my hand and write my comments in the margins, I am warming to the idea of electronic books, now that I have had time to play with the Kindle a bit more and have ordered books for different purposes.

My first e-books were book club selections. I ordered electronically because I had only a month to read the book and little or no time to go to libraries and book stores. I wrote a blog post comparing Kindle to the Nook when the new reader, the Nook, came out and explained some of my early forays into the electronic book world here.

The two books pictured above are the first books I would previously have gone out of my way to order as hard copies. Thus, I felt a little unfaithful to the old form  book when I ordered them today. Previously, I probably would have ordered them as used books online. However, in this case, I saved money by placing a Kindle edition order, because the books were recently published and therefore not available cheaply as used books.  I even paid more ($14.27) than the usual price for an e-book to get the Yagoda book, but it would have cost more to order it new or used, and it would have taken days for it to arrive. In both cases, the digital price was the cheapest price and obviously the only one that could put the book in my lap in seconds. 

I will attempt to underline the books as I read them–something that is supposedly possible but sounds like it might be cumbersome.

What experiences have you had with e-books and e-book readers? Will you pledge to remain faithful to paper books, or will you ditch them easily and eagerly for digital books?

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Jeff Bezos was laughing all the way to the bank when he visited Jon Stewart on this show–and when he had a near-monopoly on the early e-book market.  But in the technology world, the West is a Wild place, and the Halloween cackle you hear tonight might be coming from Barnes & Noble or Apple.  Oooh, Jeff Bezos, scary!

After three months, three purchases, several free books, and a brand new iPhone, I am still experimenting with e-books.  My review will not explain how e-paper works or what is in the technology rumor mill about new products.  I’m far from a geek!  But I am a “user” (“Hi. My name is Shirley, and I try to stay young by adopting technology slightly ahead of my age-group”). Below is a list of things the Kindle gets right:

1. Ease of purchase! I have wireless access in my home and a one-click account with Amazon. I have used my Kindle primarily for book club selection purchases.  Why? The closest decent library is ten miles away. Same for bookstore. My time is precious to me. Do I want to spend at least an hour finding the book (building in some browsing time to make it a good experience), counting the cost of gas in dollars and damage to the environment, or do I want to hear the title, type in the name of the book, and have the book in my Kindle in under a minute?  Easy choice and good expenditure of $9.99 each time.

2. You can read a Kindle outdoors.  I did this a few times this summer.  I never got to the beach, sad to say, but it would be fun to have a Kindle there, I think.

3. I enjoyed the text-to-speech feature on a book I was not captured by but wanted to “read” as a good book club member.  I let the voice drone on as I fell asleep and then picked up the text where it left off the next day.  Too bad the function doesn’t have a sleep timer on it. I had to recharge the Kindle the next day.

4. The charge lasts a long time–long enough to get you across the Atlantic or Pacific.  I will be testing my thesis on that when I go to Prague in ten days.  Using the comments section below, I’ll report on that experience. 

5. Light weight, size, readability are all fine by me. It’s great to have one place to “store” old books and to collect new ones. Some day, I suppose, we will carry the Library of Congress around in one small device.  This one is the Model T that makes us imagine an infinity of words–the best (and worst) of what has been thought and said–available to us at all times. What Google did for fragments of quotes, e-readers (and Google book scanning) can do for whole books. Think of one, download one, ad infinitum.

What the Kindle can’t or doesn’t do well:

1. No color and poor graphics. That didn’t bother me in my first books, but having it show up (as in Barnes and Noble’s forthcoming Nook) would be a definite enhancement.  Black and white (or grey on grey) never competes when color is an equal option.

2. Exclusivity. Amazon went the way of IBM’s early personal computer software philosophy. Make it proprietary. Programmers can’t add features and users can’t share books.  Nook will allow readers to share a book with one other reader, supposedly. Amazon may be forced to change if competition gets stiff on either front.

3. The keyboard is stiff and clunky.  If Apple had designed this thing, it would link to everything other digital function you’ve got at the touch of the screen. My guess is that some day/month/year soon we will see an enlarged iPhone or a smart iReader that blows the Kindle out of the water. In the meantime, I have downloaded the Kindle for iPhone app and will compare the two ways of reading.  iPhones can be read in the dark (although I wonder what extended use does to the eyes??), whereas Kindles need either overhead or little reading lights. Nicholson Baker preferred the iPhone read.  I am not sure I will, but I’ll let you know if I do.

4. All electronic devices share the problem of toxic waste/poor recycling options. Baker predicts that five years from now Kindles will be buried in Nigerian landfills. Balance that damage against that of killing trees and producing ink and hauling books around the world. Perhaps a little less environmental harm, but a definite flunk on the “do no harm” test.

5. The Kindle without any competition could become a monster.  Talk about too big to fail! Amazon is currently charging three dollars less for my copy of  The Lost Symbol than they are paying the publisher!! This kind of tactic is just that–a temporary loss leader used by giants with monopoly signs in their eyes. When they control the market, they have the power to dictate to everyone else–writers, editors, publishers, and maybe even consumers. I did not think of this when I asked for a Kindle for my birthday last year.  But I just might ask for a newer, competitor’s model also–or maybe I’ll enjoy the Barnes & Noble e-book reader I already downloaded on my iPhone for free!

Jeff Bezos, I know you are still laughing out there.  But I think I hear the thundering of hooves from Cupertino, too!