On Sixties Music and E-books

Remember the sixties? No? Neither do I! Believe it or not, the sixties was before my time (just), but there was a lot of really good music that came out of that era, both in the UK and the US. Back in the early sixties, recording studios were fairly basic. Bands would record to two, perhaps four tracks, and effects would be limited to reverb and not much else. Essentially, what you heard on the record was not much different to what you’d get in a live performance. Check out this clip of The Beatles singing “She Loves You” in 1963 (look–no autotune!):

You may or may not like the song, but that performance showcases the song itself. There’s no fancy production work, no lush overdubs and autotuning. What you hear there is pretty much what you heard on the studio recording. Aside from The Fab Four shaking their heads and looking awesome (I’m a Beatle fan, sorry!), there’s nothing else to distract you from the song.

These days, and really for the last thirty years, the record producer has almost become one of the band in most studios. The work he or she puts into the sound of the recording is almost as important to the overall sound and appeal of the music as the song itself. Have you ever heard a song on the radio (or on your mp3 player), and then heard it live and thought “wow–that’s almost like a different song!”? The only difference is the lack of production and studio wizardry in the live setting. And often its the stripping away of all that production that reveals how good a song really is on its own.

Similarly, as much as I like real, physical books, I too can be distracted by the new book smell, the beautiful cover design, the fonts, or even just the weight and feel of the book itself. And sometimes we can pre-judge a book on those criteria, not on how good the actual story is. Maybe the physical book is like that carefully crafted, studio mixed song, where the song itself is hidden under layers of production, and the e-book is like the live performance. Sure, you get a digital representation of the cover art, and perhaps even some replication of the original font used. But you lose the feel of the book, the smell of the fresh pages, and all those other things that delight the bibliophile, but really aren’t part of the story. Perhaps, in this sense, e-books actually bring us closer to the text.

Don’t get me wrong–I love books. I have a lot of them, and will always prefer physical books. But I throw these thoughts out there to suggest that there’s something about the rawness of the e-book, that factor that makes us paper-and-ink fans uncomfortable, that forces us to the story more immediately than the physical novel.

What do you think? Especially those who have been reading e-books for a while, do you find it easier, harder, better, or no different than reading regular books?