As opposed to what, fake books?

Spotted this on Mastodon this afternoon. What an odd and kind of infuriating question. What do you think I’m reading, the fucking Necronomicon?

I know electronic copies of books aren’t “real” in the physical sense but they still require a physical device to read them—Kindle, phone, computer, whatever. The issue of audiobooks is a lot more vexed, but if we leave that aside for now and limit ourselves to the words on the page, are the latter any more real in a paperback than in an .epub file? Is it more real in hardback? Is the author’s original manuscript written by their own hand more real? What if they never actually “wrote” it as such and did the whole thing on a typewriter or (perish the thought) a computer? What if the author types it all up in Word then sends it to a publisher to actually print it, is it not real or something until the latter step takes place?

I don’t know, I just find this sort of thing to be bullshit and always have done. Saw it decades ago with cinephilia (I still hate that fucking word), here’s an example from an ancient (year 2000!) edition of Senses of Cinema:

If the purist ideal of cinephilia can be at least provisionally and minimally defined as access to the screening of 35mm prints of international “art films” in a reasonably current and timely manner, then for all intents and purposes, I would have to say that what little cinephilia I have experienced was mostly limited to the years 1973-75, and ended for most intents and purposes with the US release of Sauve qui peut (Jean-Luc Godard, 1979) in 1980 or 1981. […]
I don’t consider the borderline between cinephilia/non-cinephilia to be located at the film/video juncture, but at the more primary juncture and technical/perceptual crevasse separating 35mm film projection and 16mm film projection.

Bill Flavell

Which latter point leads into some kind of technical discussion about how only 35mm film projection at 24 frames per second is “cinematically specific” and 16mm isn’t, so “if you haven’t seen a particular film in 35mm projection, then you haven’t “really” seen the film”. Where this leaves 70mm presentations (including blowups from 35mm like the reissues of Vertigo and The Godfather I saw in the late 90s, or Todd-AO which ran at 30fps), 35mm blowups of films shot on 16mm (like this “international ‘art film'” I wonder if Bill managed to see in “timely” fashion), and the vast majority of silent cinema which wasn’t even filmed at 24fps is something I don’t know.

Ultimately this nonsense comes down to issues of availability and access. Films (and TV shows) have a particular problem, of course, in that words on a page aren’t (usually) changed by their physical presentation; if the page be trade paperback size, quarto, on Bible paper, etc, they’re still the same words. Film doesn’t have this comparative luxury; reducing a film from 35mm to 16mm or even 8mm changes the visual information in the image (to say nothing of what video does), and that does make it not the same as the “real” thing. But what do you do when the only surviving material of a film is one of those reductions? Cf. the 1923 Hunchback of Notre Dame, of which the oldest known existing material is a 16mm print? It might have been produced in 1926 from the original 35mm negative, but it’s not the same as an actual 35mm print. So what do I do? Refuse to watch it and stomp my feet until an actual 35mm print turns up? Or do I make do with what exists and not deny myself? What do I do in the face of old TV shows produced on video but only surviving as film telerecordings? Do I just start watching Doctor Who at Tom Baker?

And the same with books, most of which I now acquire electronically cos 1) it’s substantially cheaper and quicker and 2) actually reading printed books is getting harder and harder for me; I have a diabetic’s eyes and a stroke survivor’s hand, and it’s a lot easier to manipulate settings on my Kindle than it is to try and hold open and read something printed decades ago in a stupidly small close-packed typeface. Obviously there are books, usually big illustrated ones (Taschen art books and that sort of thing), that simply don’t work in the same way, but if I’m just dealing with a novel, with plain text, then as long as the ebook has as few textual issues as possible… what am I supposed to do, not read it? Spend potentially silly amounts of money and time searching for a print copy that I may not be able to actually read now? Or, again, do I live with what I can actually get my virtual hands on? (Ebooks take up a damn sight less real estate, too…)

Ideal situations are lovely, of course, but the problem with them is they are ideal and they’re only great if you can actually make use of them. I mean, I like a nice physical edition of a good book (I have a stack of Folio Society editions to the left of me), and seeing a classic film on the big screen is fine (some of my best filmgoing experiences have been seeing 2001 in 70mm, twice, and a touring restoration of A Matter of Life and Death—godDAMN but that 1940s Technicolor was something to behold), but… I’m not a better person as a result. My blu-ray of 2001 will do me nicely. I have a big print edition of Powys’ Glastonbury Romance, I like having it, I like that I read it back in the days when I was still able to without undue difficulty, and I like that I now have the ebook edition of it for when I want to reread it cos I think that print version might be a bit beyond me.

And if you personally prefer the big screen experience and/or the ink on paper experience, good for you. But there’s something that’s just so smug about this meme that makes me want to break things. You’re not morally superior for still reading “real” books, you’re just a git. Get your hand off yourself.