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Reviews
"Being Dead" by Jim Crace
A haunting novel about a couple caught and killed in flagrante delicto -- how they got there, and what happens before they're found.
By Gary Krist
[03/30/00]

Ivory Tower
Poison pen
The execution of writer Robert Brasillach for "intellectual crimes" during World War II raises questions we still don't know how to answer.
By Lawrence Osborne
[03/29/00]

Reviews
"The Fig Eater" by Jody Shields
A first-time novelist, recasting a Freudian case history as a psychosexual detective story, wonders what would have happened if "Dora" had been murdered.
By Maria Russo
[03/29/00]

John-John, I kinda knew ye
And I'm going to make a bundle writing about you. A JFK Jr. underling pens a memoir.
By Craig Offman
[03/28/00]

The revolution that wasn't
Stephen King's e-book success proves that the new boss will be the same as the old.
By Steven M. Zeitchik
[03/28/00]

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The Future of the Book Salon examines how the digital revolution is changing what and how we read.   Read also: Brave new e-books We've seen the future of publishing, and the wrong people are freaking out. By Craig Offman   The revolution that wasn't Stephen King's e-book success proves that the new boss will be the same as the old. By Steven M. Zeitchik   Cassandra complex Sven Birkerts says computers are destroying literature. He couldn't be more wrong. By Brigitte Frase

Still, SoftBook's deal with the Journal intrigues me. Print newspapers get on my nerves. Every morning when I buy my copy of the New York Times, I have to extract and discard the sports section and often the automobile supplement. On Sundays, I automatically toss out a huge wad of the paper, mostly classifieds. When I'm done reading the sections I am interested in, there's another pile of newsprint to either jam guiltily in the wastebasket or lug over to the nearest recyclables depository. Besides, the large pages of broadsheets are difficult to read, especially on the subway, and the ink always seems to wind up smeared on my face.

I buy an e-book subscription to the Times, and even though it doesn't download while I sleep, it's still pretty handy. Soon I'm reading the day's top stories with a single, unbesmirched hand. If I'm on a crowded train and have to stand, I still have one hand free to hold on with as I read effortlessly through the articles -- no awkward folding, no tucking sections under my arms, no wresting the paper into a convenient position. I feel the unreasonable smugness of someone who has beaten the system. It's like shopping wholesale.

Here's what I see: The screen is fairly small, 4 1/2 inches by 3 inches and the default font resembles the classic Macintosh Geneva: sans serif with streamlined letter forms. The resolution is good but not anywhere close to that of print, and there's no color (not that I miss it) beyond the greenish glow that the screen gives off, which is identical to that of a Palm Pilot. The brightness of the backlighting, along with the font style and size and the page orientation, can be adjusted.

The document I'm reading appears as one long, continuous stream of text. I use Page Forward/Back buttons built into the case to scroll down through it -- they're easy to push with the thumb of the hand that's holding the device. Along the right side of the screen there's a long, thermometer-style navigation bar that shows me how far along I am in the text. Menus enable me to switch to another document or book, to add underlines or annotations, to zip to specific pages, etc. I can activate them with a stylus attached to the e-book, but most of the time I just use my finger. Some documents, like the e-book edition of the New York Times, have hyperlinks so that you can touch one in a list of headlines and get the entire story.

But here's the inevitable rub: The version of the Times I've bought for my e-book contains only a small percentage of the stories that run in the edition I can buy at my corner newsstand. I get the top stories, mostly international, and way too much of the business coverage. But I don't get any of the arts coverage, including the book reviews, although I can pay extra to get the full books coverage plus some additional content from the Times' Web site. The stuff most e-book owners need to read may be the business coverage, but for me it's the cultural journalism. Plus, the one part of the paper I read purely for pleasure, the Metro section -- home to gnomic reports of strange crimes, tales of domestic tragedy and offbeat stories about exotic species of trees inexplicably discovered in Brooklyn -- is MIA as far as my e-book is concerned.

Likewise, most of the periodicals available in Rocket eBook format are the things that litter the coffee tables of early adopters: Bloomberg.com, the Industry Standard and -- hey -- there's Salon.com, but only a best-of collection that's sterling (if I do say so myself) but dated. My first request for Salon's "current weekly book review" gets me a piece that's a month old, and the second time I try I get an error message. Eventually I figure out how to transfer current Salon stories to the e-book by calling up each story, clicking on the "print this page" option, then saving the resulting page as an HTML file to my hard drive and then using RocketLibrarian to convert it to e-book format. This isn't hard, but it's tedious.

Still, the ability to download Salon stories to my e-book turns out, surprisingly, to be one of the device's most appealing and useful features. As the amount of Salon's content has mushroomed, I've found myself reading less and less of it, because I already spend too much time at my computer. For me, it's not the actual screen that makes reading from a screen undesirable -- it's the fact that the screen is part of the machine I work on more than eight hours a day, restricted to a limited range of postures. Once I'm done working, I don't want to linger at my keyboard to do my recreational reading; sometimes I print stories out, but that seems like a waste of paper. With the e-book, I'm able to read my colleagues' work while stretched out on my sofa, curled up in my armchair, even as I chug along on the Stair Master at the gym.

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