Reading Poetry and Paying for It

As people in the world of poetry know, the University of Chicago Press allows anyone to download one free e-book a month, though it is a book of its choosing. Since the press doesn't have to reproduce the book in any tactile form, these digital copies are reasonably cheap to distribute and represent only the loss of revenue, rather than the loss of revenue and the loss of the possibility of revenue that a hardcopy book represents. But why would the UCP release twelve books for free each month? Because, as it always is with gifts from a profit-making enterprise, because it is a way to make money. And today I learned just how this works.

Keeping in mind that I don't begrudge a press' making money, let me note up front that I spend plenty of money each year on books of poetry, or books somehow related to poetry. While working in the kitchen tonight, I thought to myself that I buy more books of poetry a year than most people buy books at all. And then I realized the ridiculousness of that thought. To compare my purchasing of books, which is rampant and undisciplined, which is evidence of my desire to drink the word (and the image of word) until the thought of drinking can no longer be made in my head--and that time never comes--with those of the general public is to assume there is some comparison that might be made. But there is not. Those of us like me are merely insane, insatiable when it comes to the written word. I've been enamored of that word since before I could read.

So I decided to download UCP's freely offered book of the month today: Charles' Bernstein's My Way. (I imagined, of course, Sid Vicious, though in the guise of Gary Oldman, singing a song.) The subtitle of the book is Speeches and Poems, which made me want to pull a copy down onto the hard drive of my computer. The idea there was alluring: the idea of the writer as everything about writing. Not just a poet, but a thinker, someone who could not, or would not, see the distinction between the poem based on theory and the theory from which the poem might flower. And in his preface to the book, in the first sentence even, Bernstein seems to make the point I'd wanted the book to make: "What is the difference between poetry and prose, verse and essays?" It's not even a statement. It's interrogative.

I couldn't just read the book, though. I had to download a free copy of Adobe Digital Editions first. This product appears to be an e-reader software for PDFs, and I could see Adobe's interest in developing such a product. It's its way of trying to control the market, to make the e-reader solutions bed PDF-based, which Adobe could then argue for on the basis that PDF is an open international standard. And the PDF is a good reading platform. It is one that can ensure the maintenance of the look and feel of a "real" book, but one that can still support digital text, text that can be copied out of a book and repurposed. Of course, there's no real need for the e-reader if that was one's only goal, because Adobe Reader, Adobe Acrobat, and any number of other PDF readers could allow a way to read the PDF I downloaded after downloading Adobe Digital Editions. This new product has one goal: DRM. Digital Rights Management. The control of UCP's intellectual property.

The reader also, I should add, provides a few other features not common in PDF software products: a left sidebar with the table of contents, a shelving area for your books, and the ability to bookmark pages. Otherwise, it's a regular PDF reader, just a little klugier. Let me make it clear that I read on a computer screen for hours a day, much more than I read in paper, which is sometimes also for hours a day.

But I found the process of reading this book remarkably uncomfortable. If I left the book as a two-page spread, I could not read the text comfortably. And flipping pages is PDFy. I wanted to swipe my mouse over the page to turn a page, but I could not. I had to use arrows, and the arrows on this interface are small and stuck in the corner. They work just as they do in Adobe Acrobat, but I find that unnatural. I want to hit a right arrow, so I can move to the right through the book, but I have to hit a down arrow (to move down into the book?). Anyway, when I enlarge the page to make the text readable, it becomes horribly pixelated, quite ugly, and I just could not read it. The text looks as if it has been PDF'd not from the original digital file, but from paper and then OCR'd. It was agony. I could read for about three minutes, and then I gave up.

And what did I do? I decided to buy Bernstein's Attack of the Difficult Poems, because social media (initiated by Bernstein himself) told me that this book was available for 30% off right now from UCP. And it was. Then I decided to get Girly Man, Bernstein's penultimate book of poems if my memory serves me, because I suddenly realized I'd never bought a copy, and this was also 30% off. So, finally, I decided to buy a copy of My Way. Three books for 30% off, so it's like getting one book for free. And that's how UCP made $56 from me today: by giving me a free book I could not read.

I didn't feel used. I was happy to have the books, though I have to wait for these to travel to me--I cannot read them immediately. But this process made me think about why the book might have been formatted as it was. As I fed my dogs in the basement, I thought about other e-readers I'd seen, and each of these simply let text flow over the screen, so text was totally digital, not held in place, not static. The text was set up so that one could enlarge the text and it would naturally fill the rectangle of the screen, not push out of that window the way Bernstein's book did. So I wonder if UCP decided on this method of presentation because it preserved the formatting of the poems in the book. No matter what form poems take on a page, they always make visual statements--even prose poems do. Visual form matters in poem, so if an e-reader merely allows text to grow and flow into and fill a screen the lines of a poem may be obscured and thus rendered useless.

So I wondered about a solution, and one came to me. E-readers should have two modes, which readers can toggle between during reading. One will present the paper-based formatting, which might be necessary for poems, photo books, and other more highly designed books. But the other mode has to be flowing text, because in the end reading the text is essential.

And then I thought: I have to read with on a booklike screen. I can't read on my landscape-oriented laptop. I need to read on a portrait-oriented device, or one that can be oriented in that way.

Otherwise, Charles Bernstein and the University of Chicago Press will get too rich.

ecr. l'inf.