Melville, Moby Dick and the iPad vs. Twitter and the Kindle — No Contest

I’m not sure which college courses I chose over the ones that covered Moby Dick, but somehow I avoided settling into Melville’s classic until this year.  So I was embarrassed, happy, relieved and exhausted as I finally finished Moby Dick for the first time last night.  I’ll probably try it again in a few years. I found it fascinating and really enjoyed the detailed description of the whaling industry. Melville explores his topics in a relaxed manner.  You really get a feel for the unique and often disgusting field of whaling, and about the motivations and emotional state of  his characters.  Bit by bit, Melville lets so much tension build up about the journey of the Pequod that when the title character actually appears, the pages fly by until Moby Dick has done as much damage as just about any villain in literary history.

Moby Dick is about whaling, but it is importantly a vehicle for Melville to ruminate on many topics including religion, race, aggression, madness.  There is so much going on in the book, but there are a couple of thoughts that come to mind in relation to our current global obsession with technology and broad sharing of ideas via Twitter etc.
1) Taking your time: The edition I purchased was 720 pages long, 212,758 words – which would have amounted to 1,520 or so tweets. Of course no one would be able to follow a novel like Moby Dick on Twitter.  Authors like Melville spent and continue to spend years homing in on an idea and a way to tell a story.  Not only do they have something to say, but the style of the story-telling itself is critical to the experience the reader gets from the work.  (I should note that most of the chapters in Moby Dick are very short and have a specific plot point or set of facts to deliver.)
— In Twitterville, style and context have long been given up and replaced with speed and snark.  As a lover of fiction, I do feel like I may be part of a dying breed. But the e-readers have great potential to improve the balance.  Of course, I use Twitter regularly as a marketing tool — I just don’t find it all that helpful as a research source, although it can lead you to interesting topical information.

2) Drilling deep with an e-reader: In the hefty paperback edition I read, (Penguin Classics, 2002 $10.92), there’s a forward, dozens of quotes about whaling, endnotes and wonderful illustrations of how whaling ships are set up, how a whale would be butchered (disgusting, but amazing), and a map of the voyage of the Pequod.   A wired device with a true browsing experience would give smart publishers an opportunity to animate or enhance some of that art to create a higher value product, including color maps, color diagrams and an update-able set of links to  allow a motivated reader to follow their own interests to learn about whaling, Melville’s career, literary points of view, etc.  If you are into the deconstructionist back story like me, you might do a little bit of googling and find some of these factoids:

  • Melville’s whale was a mountain?  — From the Six States hiking site: “In the mid-1800s, Herman Melville lived on a picturesque farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.  A window from Melville’s study provides a captivating view of Mount Greylock and its sister peaks.  The story goes that Melville was inspired to write Moby Dick because he was able to see — particularly in winter — the back of a whale breaking the ocean’s foamy surface in Greylock’s prominent ridgeline.”
  • Who were Melville’s peers?  Who supported the monumental task of creating Moby Dick? From the NY Times: (at Monument Mountain, Great Barrington), “… on Aug. 5, 1850, occurred the most famous short hike in American literary history, when a party that included Melville, Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes ascended through the mountain laurel to the summit for a joyous picnic. This was the first time Hawthorne and Melville had ever met; they were caught by a thunderstorm on top, and took shelter under the craggy boulders. Once the rain left off, as one of the party later described, Melville ”bestrode a peaked rock, which ran out like a bowsprit, and pulled and hauled imaginary ropes” like a sailor.”


3) Which e-reader? The iPad will dominate the market for those who want to use a book as a jumping off point for more learning.  The opportunities for research on a device like this are endless. I get the English Major scenario very well, and those studying history, poly-sci and languages will get plenty from the iPad.  Not knowing much about the study and research habits of biologists, engineers, mathematicians and physicists I will make a guess that while the iPad may not enhance the learning experience in quite such a straightforward manner, there will be an entire generation of apps that allow access to 3-d models and other amazing information, right from the book you are reading, without the need to fire up the computer.

— I don’t think the Kindle or other 1st generation readers will support this use case, but they will be fine for some readers who are not looking for a broader experience.
— And here’s some final, damning evidence against Amazon and its Kindle versions.  Check out the quote from a disgruntled purchaser of this 99 cent Kindle version of Moby Dick:

Conclusion: Amazon may be the biggest store on the planet, but if its virtual shelves are full of sub-standard goods, and it remains tone-deaf to the possibilities of the e-reading experience, there is no way the Kindle will be able to compete against the iPad juggernaut.  The publishers who embrace the iPad and its true competitors will win scores of loyal fans and learn new ways to turn a profit.

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