Introduction (Part 2 of 3): May I Play with Your Nook?

In the movie version of this essay, this is the part that shows those barren boyhood shelves being filled with rapidly multiplying books. Side by side, then topped off. The team photos disappear, the ribbons, even the foam tomahawk. Then the books are boxed up, duct-taped, and stacked onto a moving van. The back of the van clangs shut, high angle road shot of the van barreling down the freeway. Then a new house, new shelves, bigger, me proudly beaming. The books appear again, outgrow the shelves again, are boxed up, clang shut, road shot, a quick succession of green highway signs with reflective lettering—Fayetteville, Arkansas; Lawrence, Kansas; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; then New York City. Hold. Cut to me in the middle of a cramped room. Bookshelves form all four walls. They’re stacked two deep, topped off, turned against the binding. Anything to cram more in. Outside the window a brick wall. My wife stands in the doorway, a stern look on her face, never looking more like her own mother than now, a baby on her hip, wailing, of course. Cut to the baby’s crib, cemented with books. And…scene.

The funny thing, the Prequel, if you will, is that we just went through this with the CD’s. I hear about couples who get together and combine their individual music collections into one super-collection, like a corporate merger. They honeymoon on the money they make selling their duplicates on eBay. Never mind “We’re staying together for the children;” instead it’s “We’re getting together for the music,” their collection as strong a bind as house ownership or a shared retirement fund or, oh yeah, their marriage.

This was not the case with Leu and me. When we first got together, I had 450 CD’s, she had four. She had the Sleepless in Seattle soundtrack, the Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection, Marc Cohn Marc Cohn, and Glenn Frey’s Soul Searchin’. Suffice it to say we did not honeymoon on the duplicates. Though I think overall Leu has enjoyed the benefits of the inherited collection, it was the source of at least some anxiety early on, not the collection itself as much as its upkeep and management.

One compromise we reached not long after moving in together was that we wouldn’t scatter the CD’s across the bedroom floor.

“You know, they make things to prevent this kind of situation from happening,” she said.

“‘Situation,’” I replied. “What do you mean ‘situation?’”

“Discs strewn about like lily pads. That kind of thing.”

“Oh, that.”

“Some of them even encourage you to keep the disc and the jewel case together.”

“Interesting.”

“Just something to think about. It might be nice to get up in the middle of the night without jabbing your heel on a jagged piece of plastic.”

I have to admit, I saw her point. Yet, despite all of their attempts to be otherwise, CD cases are notoriously unfashionable. Even the sexiest models—those tall, sleek towers that look like the obelisk from 2001—can’t escape their fate: namely, to house four-by-four-inch pieces of plastic. Close your eyes and envision the ideal CD case, and it’s probably one that hides the CD’s completely. This is telling.

"Aw, man. That CD rack really tied the room together."

Ultimately, we settled on three 144-disc carriers rather than one higher-capacity version. We thought we neutralized the garishness by opting for a natural-wood finish, like something you would have picked up next to the prize-winning jam at the county fair or something you would display because your kid made it in shop. The results were mixed. First of all, simple math, which apparently wasn’t so simple for us: I started with 450 discs; she contributed four. We bought three 144-disc carriers. 144 x 3 = 432. 454 > 432. So right away there was overflow. Little-listened to recordings were exiled to the top of a closet. But even that fails to account for future accumulation, this in Napster’s infancy, when “accumulation” was only possible through physical means.

Another challenge: What to do with packaging that didn’t conform? The cardboard cases that were becoming all the rage and that were often oversized, and the plastic sleeves preferred by DIYers that disrupted the 12-disc symmetry per section, to say nothing of the box sets? Dear god, the box sets! Should they be stacked lengthwise on top? Should the discs be removed and arrayed with those that did not belong to a larger whole? Was this fair? Did this somehow undo the power of the box?

But all of these questions of conformity and fit paled in the face of the biggest question of all: What about the aesthetics? Could anything possibly be done about the aesthetics? Because, I have to be honest, the natural finish wasn’t enough. We had scoffed at people who organized their rooms around the placement of the television—OK, so the TV goes there, which means—but how was it better to pull the room together with a collection that didn’t even have the decency to submit to remote control? At one point, I mixed it up a bit by organizing the carriers in a pyramid style, with two of them on the floor jutting out at opposite diagonals like a woman in stirrups, the third bridging the distance on top. I thought this would make the room arts-ier, sex up the otherwise purely functional. But who knew that echoing a trip to the OBGYN wasn't sexy? Apparently, I didn't. Those CD’s—and the three-foot high speakers that accompanied them like a sidecar—were the greatest threat to the early days of our relationship.

Luckily, the iPod came along and saved my marriage. By the time we were in New York, we now had an entire bookshelf devoted to CD’s, despite the fact that all of its relevant content was stored on this device that was no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Once again, the shelf was the dominant piece of furniture in the living room, even though everything on it that had been acquired in the past three years had been ripped rather than played, and that only once. So I was ready when, one night, after a few gin-n-tonics, I noticed my wife quietly contemplating the shelf.

“Do you think, maybe, we could…?”

“Absolutely,” I said, not even letting her finish. I knew it was coming, was surprised that the discs had lasted this long, actually, though in hindsight I realize that it had only been two years since I unloaded my cassettes, and perhaps she was giving me time to grieve.

Today, there’s a stack five-high of recently acquired discs in the four-foot space I have carved out for myself behind the bedroom door, but otherwise everything that was once the centerpiece of the living room is now in a box under the bed. Some might be in storage. See how much it bothers me? I’m not even sure where they all are anymore.

Though I’m absolutely guilty of romanticizing music, I am not one who romanticizes its packaging or even its format. I confess to a pang of loss when I think about all of those great album covers from the ‘60’s and ‘70’s—Electric Ladyland, Pearl, Dark Side of the Moon—and how much album art was undercut by the diminutive canvas of the cassette—a rite of passage for Beatles fans everywhere and for all time has been identifying the people on the cover of Sgt. Peppers, a pastime that will eventually go the way of baseball cards in the spokes or, worse yet, baseball itself—but I have no interest in the hipster-driven resurgence of vinyl. Albums are clunky, un-portable, and scratchy. Why would I want to go back to that, other than to appropriate someone else’s nostalgia for something I never really experienced in the first place? Wanting an album is as bad as wanting a Volkswagen. The head of some advertising firm wanted a Volkswagen when he was young, so now he wants me to want one too. 

Albums were something my dad had. I accessed music differently. I vaguely remember 8-tracks, grew up on tapes, transitioned to CD’s then MP3’s, all without even a remote sense of loss. This evolution feels natural to me, particularly with a form (recorded music) that is relatively young in the grand scheme of things. (I imagine the same argument could be made for the shift from celluloid to digital video.) I don’t even import the album covers to my iPod. I don’t want to take up space that could otherwise be reserved for music. For me, it’s all about the music. 

I don't miss the 8-track, the cassette, or the CD, and I damn sure don't miss vinyl.

I feel differently about books. I see the ever-increasing number of people on the train in the morning reading on their e-readers. They look so light, the e-readers, the passengers holding them with one hand, Fred Flintsone and his prehistoric strength reading his morning tablet. I used to project a feeling of smugness onto the readers themselves, as if what they were reading wasn’t as important as what they were reading it on. Look at me looking at this. That kind of thing. But I’m over it now. Now I see that they are just as engaged as us Luddites with our Times or Post or paperback. After all, none other than Nicholson Baker assured me in his New Yorker article that the e-reader can achieve the most transcendent state that a narrative-delivery system can hope to achieve: eventually it just disappears, leaving only the story behind, the grin of the cat, as it were.

For the most part, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid contact with the various e-readers, in the same way that a devoted husband won’t even glance at another woman. But such across-the-board abstention strikes me as being more a sign of fear than commitment, so I thought I should at least hold one in my hand—the e-reader, not another woman—if only to show that I was not afraid. A co-worker provided the opportunity when she strolled in one morning with a new gizmo in hand, a gift to herself for some long hours she had been putting in at the office.

“What do you got there?” I asked.

“A Nook.”

“A ‘Nook?’”

“It’s Barnes & Nobles’ version of the Kindle.”

“You like it?”

“Love it.”

“Yeah?”

“I downloaded, like, this eight-volume collection of books about the British monarchy.”

“Wow.”

“I know.”

“It’s on there?”

“Yep.”

“All eight volumes?”

“Yep. Maybe $30 for all eight.”

“That’s pretty good.”

“Uh, yeah.”

I paused, not knowing which line to pursue: the price, the capacity, or her unexpected fondness for the British monarchy. Instead, I surprised even myself by saying the dirtiest thing I have ever said to anyone at work: “May I play with your Nook?”

She looked at me with one eye cocked, unsure if a double entendre was intended and if so was this an HR-able offense? After a few seconds, she must have decided that I was benign. “Sure,” she said, and passed it over the half-wall of my cubicle.

This, however, feels like a loss. 

I hefted the Nook in my hand. It was light, as I suspected, but not cheap. It felt sturdy. Maybe not book sturdy, but sturdy, nonetheless. I looked at the screen. It was big enough. Small by a computer’s standards but bigger than the page of a paperback. The words were very readable, I begrudgingly admitted. I had less a sense of staring at a computer screen than I expected. My oft-repeated “Why would I want to stare at a computer screen after spending a whole day starting at computer screen?” line of attack was deteriorating right in front of my surprisingly comfortable eyes. Then I clicked the arrow designating “turn page.” The screen changed, the page turned. Whoa. Rarely do I get a physical sensation from an electronic command—the clicking sound that the iPod makes like the wheel on the “Price Is Right” a curious exception—but I did so now. I clicked back, the page turned again. I felt exhilarated. I wanted to take it for a test drive. Bookmark a page. Search for a specific word. Explore the Notes feature. The front cover, back cover, copyright page. All of that stuff that I had heretofore reserved for only book books.

I handed it back.

“Cool,” I said.

But it wasn’t just cool. It was cooler than cool. It was the future. I knew it.

Damnit.