Drinking wine through a straw

Intimations of challenges for the book publishing business started 10 days before the national lockdown. A publisher abruptly told an author that her book launch scheduled for that day stood cancelled because the office had decided to institute Covid-19 social distancing norms. Having invited industry notables for a panel discussion, the author pointed out that it would be embarrassing to cancel at a few hours’ notice (a predicament that the entire country was to face not long afterwards). 

A bizarre sequence followed. The publishers agreed to allow the book launch to go ahead at the hall they’d booked and even offered to send across some copies for the author to sell (she couldn’t, because commercial activities were not permitted at the institution in which the launch was taking place). Only, their reps wouldn’t be there to officially host the event. That must have been the last book launch before the cancellations from other publishers poured in. 

The demise of book launches for the foreseeable future should not be mourned. They had become an almost obligatory marketing tool because of the steady diminution of footfalls to book shops, in part because of online competitors but also because fewer people are reading books. 

Book launches are curious animals, a hybrid between earnest intellectualism and unabashed tamasha. Their frequency has grown in indirect proportion to the addressable market and some events frequently far outweigh the quality or significance of the book that’s being promoted. Launches that promise alcohol and canapés in addition to a dial-a-quote politician or celebrity even make it to the Page 3 gossip columns. 

Like every other business, the abrupt lockdown threw publishers in limbo. With courier services closed, they could not send books to reviewers. Global publishers marketing foreign books in India were hard hit as the closure of ports trapped books in warehouses. After a brief hiatus, though, the industry perked up and started focusing on e-books.  Some even pointed to availability on Amazon Kindle. This has certainly kept the supply chain and publisher profits lubricated (though not necessarily author royalties).  

But reading e-books entails significant adjustments for readers. Let me explain before I am summarily relegated to the ranks of the geriatric. E-books and the Amazon Kindle are great inventions. They allow you to carry around multiple books without adding to the weight restrictions airlines impose on luggage, crowding shelf space at home and enable you to read in the dimmest of lighting. 

But here’s the thing I discovered: E-books work well strictly for fiction – that too, of the honest-to-god best-seller type. If it’s Daniel Silva, Jeffrey Archer or Robert Harris, all Swedish crime fiction, Lee Child — you get the drift — the format lends itself brilliantly to the reading experience. 

Beyond the page-turners, though, the limitations of the e-book become evident, which compels me to regard reviewers who agree to review books via PDFs and assorted formats as nothing short of heroic.  

Thank you, Kindle, for helping me replace classic fiction bedraggled from age, multiple house shifts or voracious termites — from John Le Carre to Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Primo Levi and even J D Salinger. But these are writers whose prose demands savouring, lingering over, flipping back and forth. The bookmark function on Kindle allows you to do that but it’s not quite the same as pleasurably flipping the pages of a book to rediscover a favourite passage. It’s like drinking vintage wine through a straw. I ended up replacing most of them with physical copies.

Non-fiction is the bigger struggle, unless the book involves straight analysis, since Kindle has a convenient feature that allows you to access the notes in real reading time. Beyond that, the experience deteriorates.  If the book has illustrations, then you get to see sub-optimal reproductions — do not, for instance, order the Kindle edition of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs. It’s about half the price of the hard copy but you’ll miss out on the sumptuous photographs and Sebag Montefiore’s imaginative captioning.  

If the book in question contain maps, tables and charts then the exercise becomes hellish. Ross Chernow’s 2017 biography of Ulysses S Grant, too expensive to buy in hard copy, deepened my understanding of the American Civil War and of one of America’s more under-rated presidents. But following the maps illustrating key battles demanded contortions of neck and eyeballs. I learnt the hard way to mobilise the services of my smartphone to view maps more clearly (and, luckily, there is no shortage of Civil War analysis online). Alas, original research by an author in the form of tables or charts demands contortions of neck and eyeballs.

And then, we’re forgetting the best things about the real thing: The intoxicating smell of the chemicals from paper and ink. The high is almost as good as a glass of wine.  

Pandemic Perusing is an occasional freewheeling column on books and reading by our writers and reviewers