The E. L. Moore eBook is a Non-thing

I’m reading Byung-Chul Han’s recent book, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. It’s fascinating, and has a lot to say about model building if read in a certain frame of mind. Although, before I got deep into that line of thought I was stopped dead early on by Han’s comments on eBooks:

For Benjamin, a book has a fate insofar as it is a thing, a possession. It carries material marks that give it a history. An e-book is not a thing, but information; it has an altogether different status of being. Even if we have it at our disposal, it is not a possession. It is something to which we have access. An e-book reduces a book to informational value. The book has no age, place, craft or owner. It lacks the auratic distance from which an individual fate could speak to us. 

A couple of things to note before we move on. First, the italics are Han’s. Also, the sentence, “The book has no age, place, craft or owner” I think has been mistranslated from the original’s German, and should instead read, “The e-book has no age, place, craft or owner”. I think that makes more sense in the overall context of the discussion.

There’s more to his thoughts on the eBook, but that snippet seems to capture the gist of it. 

Overall I agree with his position on the eBook. It is a degraded form of book. I would have preferred the E. L. Moore book to appear as a paperback instead of exclusively as an eBook, but ultimately the form of delivery was determined by money: a physical book would have cost too much and have severely limited its reach.

My first move in the early days of putting the book together was to see if any of the model railroad publishers would be interested in it. None were. That wasn’t surprising and I don’t fault them for their position. E. L. Moore was born in the 19th century, died in 1979, and his heyday as a model maker was from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s, so the audience that would recall him and his work is limited. Also, his approach to model making and model railroading has been long out of fashion, so this further reduces the potential set of buyers. Publishers are businesses, and there’d be little money to be made from the book.

I looked into print-on-demand options, but given the number of colour images and page count, the cover price was hitting $100. At those prices even I wouldn’t buy my own book :-) And there was no way I could afford to print copies on spec. What about a kickstarter type thing? I’m not interested in begging.

In the end it was an eBook or nothing. Nothing was not an option because I wanted to preserve the core of the E. L. Moore research in a more permanent form than a blog, whose existence is at the whims of a giant corporation. At least an eBook is easy to circulate, as long as it’s not DRMed of course. And it’ll eventually be on file at Library and Archives Canada.

Maybe the aura only exists in the depths of the E. L. Moore Archive?

So, yes, the E. L. Moore eBook will never have the auratic attributes Han and Walter Benjamin identify with physical books. But, not all physical books do. Most live ignominious lives and end up in landfills, or are pulped. It’s only a rare few that pass from reader to reader over the ages, collecting the artifacts of use, age, and love. Those are indeed beautiful and significant. With the eBook I’ve settled on its ability to circulate as its good, which I think is important. 

It might not have the potential for an aura that a physical book does, but the E. L. Moore eBook can readily circulate, which may ease the process of finding simpatico readers in this day and age. Given the world’s high inflation and ubiquitous electronic devices, hopefully the eBook format is less prone to biblio-sclerosis, and is effective at getting the E. L. Moore word out.

Really? Can it ‘get the E. L. Moore word out’ and cajole readers into taking Moore seriously by learning about him, and trying out his methods and approaches for themselves? I’d like to think so, but I’m growing more skeptical. One reason, which dawned on me while reading Han’s book, is the disconnect between how Moore made his models and created his articles (real, hand-made, physical processes) and how I created the eBook (mostly virtual, digital processes). There’s some sort of conceptual leap from the digital to the physical required on the part of the reader that might be impossible to enact in our interneted world. More on this later. 

I must say though, Han’s book packs a lot of ideas into very few pages.