Large print books v. Kindle

English majors love to lament the passing of the bookstore. To hear them whine about it, our digital age is a tragedy. Oh, how they miss thumbing through the worn pages of their favorite canonical works. The smell of the ink on the paper, the weight of the book in their hands changing as they progress from beginning to middle to end. It used to give them such warm and fuzzy feelings, to leaf from page to page. But now everything's digital. They sneer, “It's just not the same.” With this last statement alone, I agree. Digital reading is just not the same. It is, in fact, one million times better than leafing through a stupid old book.

For a person who is legally blind, hardcopy books marked significant challenges, mostly related to typeface. Most books are printed in a very small font. In elementary school, any books I was assigned needed to be available in large print. Consequently, something like “Animal Farm,” George Orwell's allegory for the Russian Revolution, which is usually a fairly small book of about 115 pages or so, became an enormous, two-volume work when enlarged. These large print editions were made by photocopying the pages of the original book and enlarging them to fit heavy stock letter or legal sized paper. They were then bound using plastic binding of different widths. Imagine “Great Expectations” presented in three ring binders and you'll have a rough idea of the size and portability of these tomes. I know how they were made because I spent a summer making them as part of a job I had working at the low vision center. It was like making sausage, in that once I saw how large print books were assembled, I no longer wanted them. By the time I got to high school, it was ludicrous to rely on large print books anyway. The large print version of “The Scarlet Letter” contained more volumes than an Encyclopedia Britannica. So, I started reading with a magnifying glass.

The problem with most magnifying glasses is they only enlarge a small area through the lens. As a result, most of my high school reading involved me scanning line by headache-inducing line, poring over documents, lens to my eye, as if I were a detective looking for clues. I gave books on tape a shot, but they usually just put me to sleep. There were some books, mostly hardback editions, which I could read with my glassses, but if these weren't available, I was out of luck. When I didn't want to use a magnifying glass, a large print book wasn't available and the typeface on the hardback was too small, I'd just have to find good light and squint, squint, squint. In college, I squinted my way through all 1168 pages of “Atlas Shrugged” on my own, entirely in the privacy of my apartment, because reading it unaided by lenses and completely alone seemed like the most Randian way to experience her opus of selfishness.

Because I used a magnifying glass, large print book or held my face really close to the text, I was incredibly self-conscious about reading in public and would never go to a coffee house or library to read or study. Reading the newspaper or a magazine in public makes me feel like I'm on display. I feel like people are staring at me as I narrow my eyes to read, contorting my face and struggling. I felt like it made me look weak and vulnerable. It made me an easy target. It was just easier to isolate myself when I read.

When I went to graduate school to study Screenwriting and film, I was nervous about having to read all the scripts. But then I found out standard script typeface is 12 point Courier New. My desire to read something was no longer contingent on the whims of a publisher's choice in typeface. Whether TV, feature film, comedy or drama, all scripts look the same, in terms of their appearance on the page.
When I moved from LA to Chicago to teach Screenwriting and had to pack up all my books, I joked about how I should get a Kindle, but I didn't really mean it. Even though books had been so hard to read, I still really liked them as pieces of art. I love the way they look on a shelf, I love having them for reference, I love having them as trophies, proof of my education. But it sure sucked to pack them in boxes, haul them to the UPS store, pay to ship them across the country, then lug them up into my Chicago apartment and put them on shelves. Since shipping them here, I haven't bought a single hard copy of a book.

I bought a Kindle instead. Now, the typeface of the book I want to read changes with minor movements of my index fingers like I'm some kind of God. I have access to nearly everything ever written and my Kindle is smaller than a large print edition of a haiku. I can search for quotes, see what passages other people have underlined and I have no insecurities anymore about reading on the train, in coffee shops or in a library. My face is buried in a screen, just like everybody else. Somewhat ironically, because the viewing program adjusts the size of the PDF to fit the small size of my screen, the only works harder to read on a Kindle are screenplays. But that's okay, I don't miss bookstores or hardcopies of books. Nostalgia is stupid (except for this blog).