Book Chase

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Here’s one more reason that e-books will never equal the real thing.

We’ve discussed before why libraries carry such a limited selection of e-books (certain publishers refuse to sell to them) and why they have so few copies of the titles they do carry (publishers will only sell them a certain number of copies and they try to limit the number of times an e-book can be “checked out” before it has to be repurchased by the library).  All of that means that library patrons will almost always have to queue up for an e-book, placing it on hold for a few weeks before it becomes available for download to their e-reader.    Then, when the book finally becomes available, it will only be available for checkout for a few days (usually five) and can only be read for fourteen days after it has been downloaded.

Well, that combination of silliness caught up with me today.  After waiting six weeks to get a copy of Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey, I will not be able to finish it before the file becomes unreadable on my iPad.  Remember, we’re dealing with an e-book here.  Since I didn’t have a physical copy of the book to carry around, I failed to realize that the book is 720 pages long.  For that reason, I didn’t start reading it soon enough to get it done before the file becomes unreadable  - something that happens tomorrow.

My choices, you ask?  Only one comes to mind: queue up again for the book and resume reading it in another month or so.  The book cannot be renewed for another two weeks because the “corrupt by” date is built into the file on my iPad.  I realize this is only likely to happen with exceptionally long books, and that it is partially my fault for not checking the length of the book early on, but this is just more evidence that e-book publishers don’t get it.  (The OverDrive software does not show page numbers by default – a conscious effort to change the display is required for that to happen.)

One thing for certain is that I will not be rewarding Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, publisher of A Journey: My Political Life, by purchasing a copy of the book for my shelves or for my iPad, nor am I likely to line up again and wait my turn for a library copy.  Two can play at this game.  Unfortunately, even though it is not by choice, the book officially becomes my second abandoned book of 2011.

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I’ve decided this year that, when it comes to “abandoned” books, I want to do more than just keep track of the number of them I encounter.  After all, abandoned books are, in their own way, just as remarkable as books that I absolutely love –  they are just at the other extreme end of the rating scale.  These are books that even fail to allow me to turn their pages without almost groaning out loud from the effort.

That does not mean, of course, that they are necessarily “bad” books.  It simply means that after giving them a fair shot, I see going on with them as being a colossal waste of my time.  It reflects my personal reaction to these books.  Others may very well love them; see the next paragraph for proof of that.

This brings me to my experience this weekend with The 8:55 to Baghdad by Andrew Eames.  This is another book I discovered through Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust to Go and is the first of hers to which I’ve reacted negatively.

The premise of The 8:55 to Baghdad is that its author will recreate Agatha Christie’s 1928 train trip from London to Baghdad, the trip that spawned her famous Murder on the Orient Express.  The book’s subtitle, From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie, tells readers what to expect.  As Eames remarks early in the book, making this trip in 2002 is much more difficult, and potentially much more dangerous, than the trip that Christie took.  World War II and other recent conflicts in Europe have redrawn some borders and made them more difficult to cross, and the political unrest and actual fighting in the Middle East was, in 2002, getting worse by the month.

I have read and enjoyed several train-trip books in the past and expected that this one would be a treat, filled with interesting fellow passengers of the author’s and lots of colorful stories about the stops he made along the way.  That might very well prove to be the case – eventually – but after slogging through 60 pages of some of the more tedious prose I’ve read in a while, I will never know.  I simply cannot take another page of lifeless characters and writing so dry that I can barely concentrate on two consecutive sentences long enough to get their meaning.

The 8:55 to Baghdad is definitely not for me and I am stamping it as officially abandoned.