The 21st Century Digital Bibliophile

THE Guardian was asking a few days back: Will you ditch print and read books on an Apple 'tablet'?

My answer to that, both before and after the much-hyped device debuted, is a conflicted one. I love the physicality of books. I have hundreds of them, purchased from bookshops all over the US and Europe, and each one bears the additional imprint of the shelf on which I found it: this one buried in a cramped corner of English Books in Hamburg, this one discovered among the lazing cats at Twice Sold Takes in Seattle, this one bought after a leisurely try-before-you-buy read at The Tattered Cover in Denver, these from a massive haul at the Hay Festival, and those from the narrow aisles of the now shuttered Avenue Victor Hugo Books in Boston. I love the sheer act of holding one while sitting in a chair or propped up against pillows in bed; I love the satisfying feeling of progress and propulsion when turning their pages. I even love the spatial relations jigsaw exercise of packing them in boxes when it comes time to move, as we're doing now.

But I'm also an unabashed technology geek. The amazing stuff that can be done with ones and zeroes excites me on the same visceral level as books. The fact that I can automatically log and review the songs I've listened to over the past week, synchronize reams of contact information from my desktop computer to a pocket-sized mobile device, instantly record my precise latitude and longitude and embed that information in photos (shot without any of the concerns and complications that accompany film), browse hundreds of retailers to find the best price and most informative customer reviews without leaving my chair, route calls from three different countries to a single landline at practically no cost, and tally the time spent on freelance projects to the minute and invoice clients accordingly without once touching paper ... these are things that delight me to no end. I love the accessibility that digital information offers. I love the lack of physical clutter. I love, as in the case of upgrades, clicking a button on my mouse and having one set of features suddenly improved and augmented. I love the efficiency, the simplicity, the sleekness, the vastness, the possibility of it all.

eBooks represent the vexed point of convergence of these two aspects of my personality. Books without the teetering piles and crammed shelves. Books you can easily search for the passage you scribbled down on a sheet of paper and promptly lost. Books you can cover with marginalia (searchable, synchronizable) without actually defacing them. Books that can travel almost anywhere with you — an entire library's worth if you like. Books not subject to the indignity and injustice of falling out of print because some publisher deems them unprofitable.

Here is Orhan Pamuk's Snow on my iPod Touch, where it sits alongside The Captive by Marcel Proust, E.M. Forster's Howard's End, The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith, and about fifty other titles:

When I later began reading Edwin A. Abbott's How to Write Clearly, downloaded for free on the Stanza e-reader app, also free, it took little more than a click to tweet it from within the app and thus open the potential for discussion:

(It shouldn't be hard to see that this particular title is neither a popular nor a controversial one. But it's the potential I'm concerned with, not this isolated instance that arose more out of curiosity than a desire to strike up a conversation about Abbott's pedantry.)

I'm aware of the multiple drawbacks of eBooks. Digital media is actually more fickle and transient than print, especially when encumbered by DRM. eBooks need to be read on a device that requires power, which can be inconvenient or even impossible at times. Loaning a book to a friend, if such a thing is even permitted by the software and the legal restrictions, invariably requires logins and sign-ups. The physicality — the act of page-turning, the act of serendipitous discovery — is missing. eBooks have thus far been more about content than presentation, and even that all-important content gets shortchanged from time to time.

The iPad, though, for all its shortcomings (which aren'tevenclose to the same shortcomings most fly-by-night pundits would have you believe), looks as if it approaches the sort of e-reading experience I've been waiting for: something that pays homage to the classic book-reading experience, with a traditional bookshelf view, a slick page-turning effect (á la Classics), and a functional design that feels right when held in your hands. A device that will let me comfortably read a full-color PDF version of the Times Literary Supplement each week, or Harper's each month, in a way that rivals their print counterparts. A platform that will open up literature to the integration of supplementary media that is unavailable in print — not just the integrated photos of W.G. Sebald, in other words, but also video and interactive elements. This is where my inner bibliophile and my inner technophile pop the cork and toast to the future.

As excited as I am about the arrival of the iPad and all it brings with it, to answer the question that the Guardian posed last week, no, I don't see myself ditching print entirely. I doubt I will part fully with print books during my lifetime. But, speaking only for myself, I can certainly foresee the iPad helping digital media to encroach on a domain that until last Wednesday belonged exclusively and unquestionably to print. I can see subscribing to an iPad-optimized (that optimization being key) daily newspaper such as the Guardian or the New York Times for a nominal fee. I can see buying a literary sensation or two — a Bolaño, a Littell — on the iBooks store, maybe even along with some favorites (Proust, Sebald, Nabokov, Barzun, Bellow) that I'd like to have with me at all times. I can see — and this is the bit that I find most enticing, because it's the point where searching and marginalia become most practical — requesting iBooks' ePub versions of books for review rather than print copies.

Until now no other device that I know of has made such a compelling case as to why any of these changes would present a significant advantage over more established methods. Which, I think, is as much a testament to the enduring singularity of print as it is to the ingenuity and potential of the iPad.

Is There Life After Journler?

SINCE reading (admittedly rather belatedly) about the demise of Journler, the best darn journaling app for the Mac there ever was (except MacJournal back when it was freeware, but that's another story that would spoil categorical statements), I've been keeping an eye out for possible alternatives. Not because Journler's sudden move into abandonware rendered it instantly useless, but simply because I'm not confident that Journler will ever be picked up by another developer, and that in turn makes me less than keen to keep plugging entries into an app that will eventually stop working, or work in a partial or glitchy way, after a future OS upgrade. At least with apps still in development, there's a better chance that they'll make the full transition to OS X 10.7, aka "Stinky Ocelot," and beyond.

One of the features of Journler that I used to enjoy was its straight-to-blog posting. This enabled me to use the app as a multipurpose personal diary, highly subdivided catch-all note-taker, and blogging client for anything that I wanted to make public. This very useful feature was removed after my first donation, and I limped along for several years afterwards by composing my blog posts in Journler, then exporting them from there as an HTML document, then viewing the source in Safari, then copying and pasting that source into the Blogger Web editor. As far as workflows go, it probably ranked somewhere near the bottom in terms of pleasure and efficiency. But Journler was near perfect in every other way — Applescriptability, aesthetics, tags, options, iLife integration, etc. — so the whole blogging rigamarole seemed like a minor inconvenience.

With Journler's obsolescence looming, the luster has left a lot of those positive attributes. And the continued inability to blog from within the app is as good a reason as any to start hunting around for a new journaling app, something to occupy the special place in my Applications folder that Journler once did. The only criteria: in-app blog posting.

First, I gave SOHO Notes a try. I tried for more than an hour to set up my blog using all the help that turned up on various Google searches. There is no FAQ on the Chronos website that addresses this particular problem, and you have to register on their support forum to either ask a question or simply view other posters' questions. It costs $40 and the interface only lets you write in an awkward "page" or "note" view. More bells and whistles than I could use in a lifetime, all of which are turned on by default, including a persistent tab-type drawer that I discovered lurking at the corner of my screen and leapt out at me when I didn't want it to. Deleted.

Then I gave MacJournal a spin. Not bad looking overall, and about as cluttered or as minimal as you want it to be, but there are still some clunky icons left over from the freeware days (as is the delightful Taco feature, it's worth noting).

Although many aspects of MacJournal's UI are customizable, I found that much of it lacked the careful polish one expects from Mac apps: spacing on the journals sidebar was too tight, the "Entries" icon in the toolbar grew more and more separated from its text as I fine-tuned my preferred icons, and the entries sidebar wasted otherwise valuable column space when situated on the top in the three-pane view. Like Journler and SOHO Notes, MacJournal offers video and voice recording, but its visual implementation is downright awful. Trying to figure out how to create and then view a video note was a litany of UI no-no's, and when the pop-out movie window finally reappeared, the Quicktime control slider was cut off due to a buggy resize. Journler's AV note paradigm (and for that matter, SOHO Notes') is much slicker, as it shows those notes as both text links and clickable note attachments, and the recording process itself is far more intuitive. For example, the pre-recording window in Journler shows your mug as your iSight sees you; MacJournal just shows a black screen. "Is this thing on?"

MacJournal's Blogger integration was very good (it downloaded all my previous posts from this blog and imported them as entries, but it didn't preserve some formatting, like blockquotes) and the edit screen offered some basic HTML options. However, the blog configuration settings are found under the "Journal" heading in the file menu rather than in the preferences. Test posts worked okay, and the ability to keep the server-side posts in sync with the client-side posts is really handy, but it looks like adding photos or video to posts will involve the extra step of using the online Blogger editor — which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place. That certainly makes its in-app blogging less stupendous.

In terms of a Journler replacement, MacJournal remains a possibility. Yet for a paid app (normally $40, but the Mariner devs are generous with frequent 25 and even 40% off promos) with a long and rich history, it doesn't measure up to many of the features that Journler offered as donationware. I wouldn't migrate gladly, I'd do so reluctantly.

This post is being composed in MarsEdit, which marks my first experience with the app. Its blog integration is excellent; my fifty most recent posts were imported, formatting intact, in an attractive, refined UI reminiscent of an RSS reader like Vienna or NetNewsWire. The amount of customization permitted is just right. I absolutely love the different-colored HTML markup in the editing window and the supplementary live preview. The only problem is, MarsEdit isn't a journaling app. It's a blogging client. And, at $30, a pricey one at that.

At the end of my first foray into Journler replacement territory, I'm not left with a great deal of hope. In fact, it threatens to divide my personal writing workflow even further by splitting my note-taking/journaling and blogging between two separate apps: Journler (still) for the former, and MarsEdit for the latter. Journler might have been left for dead with no hope of rescue in sight, but it still offers the best mix of journaling tools and design relative to all the other apps in its category. And MarsEdit might be a staid and expensive one-trick pony, but it's awfully good at what it does. Although far from ideal, for now that division beats trying to simply make do with the quirks and shortcoming of the aforementioned candidates.