Sometimes, I am very much my father’s daughter. You see, at our family Chanukah party last month, my dad and I got into an argument (the type that’s probably better described as a friendly bickerment) about cell phones. Dad had just gotten a new phone, and when he purchased it, he had the nice Verizon employee switch off all potential web browsing, email, general internet, and even text messaging options.

My dad wants a phone. He wants to be able to call people and have them call him. That’s all he wants.

All of which is fine and dandy. Not what the bickerment was about. That came in when he insisted that my shiny black iPhone is not a phone, it’s a computer. Which, on the one hand, is true. It’s a teeny, tiny computer that I carry around in my purse, which happens to send and receive phone calls.

And so we spent half an hour arguing: “It lets me call people! That makes it a phone!” “All a phone does is send phone calls! That’s why they call them phone calls!” “You don’t get to define the word just because you don’t want to pay for a smartphone!” “I don’t want to pay for a computer plan when I just want a telephone!” “But it is a telephone!” “It is not!”

We eventually reached a consensus of, “You’re wrong,” “Your FACE is wrong,” and I stormed off to talk to more reasonable cousins, like the pre-teens who won’t talk to you unless you can quote Monty Python sketches with them.

All of which is to say, I suspect my feelings about ereader tablets are irrational and unfair, but god damn it, ereaders are for READING BOOKS, not watching movies.

I have an ereader that I very much like. It’s a black and white Nook. It’s started to go a little wonky with age, but I plan to use it until it falls apart, because it’s more or less perfect for my own, personal reading habits. It’s great for subway reading: it fits into my purse, I only need one hand to hold it (and that same hand can turn pages, or, I guess, “turn pages” since actually it’s hitting a button); it’s light enough to carry around everywhere I go¹; it holds roughly a million bajillion books, so if I finish one while I’m out, I’ve got plenty more loaded up to read; I can buy books from my couch (dangerous!) including finding a lot of things I have trouble finding in stores; and all the public domain books I want are easily found and free (did I just download the entire Sherlock Holmes canon? Why yes, yes I did).

Now, I realize that absolutely all of that is true of all color, tablet, 3G, and other various ereaders that are out there. In fact, there’s nothing my elderly Nook can do that they can’t. Which is kind of the point.

I bought my Nook to read books on. It’s black and white, which means it’s eink rather than LCD, and thus easier on my eyes for long periods of time. I mostly use it on the subway, so I wouldn’t be able to do internet-related stuff on it anyway. And if I’m not on the subway and want to do internet related stuff, I have my laptop for that, or if I’m out and about, my iPhone.² And when I’m using it at home, if I want to watch a movie… well, I probably want to have a movie on WHILE I’m reading my book, which I couldn’t do if my book and movie were playing on the same device. Besides which, I have a TV which has cable, a DVD player, and Netflix streaming hooked up, which makes for a much better movie-watching experience than something I’d have to hold on to or prop up. ³

So basically what I’m saying is: for all of those bell and whistle features, I’ve got something else that’s more effective. I don’t need and am not interested in a tablet, and if I was, instead of getting a hybrid ereader-tablet-thingy, I’d go whole hog and buy an iPad, probably. Which seems to be the crux of the matter: iPads are great for many things, but they aren’t really ereaders. Yes, they can be used for reading electronic books, but they’re designed for all kinds of other things and they also happen to let you read books. The Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire and others like ‘em seem to be chasing that market, which is only tangentially related to reading, hoping to catch on by being significantly less expensive. And that may well be a winning strategy! I am not a business person, and clearly am not the market for those devices, so what do I know?

Well. I know that I don’t want a tablet that also happens to let me read books. I want an ereader: a device designed for reading books, that doesn’t have to do anything else, damn it.

(Dad is still wrong about my iPhone, though.)

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

I’ve run across two interesting discussions about covers — book and magazine covers, that is — in the last week or so. Now, I can’t say I never judge anything by its cover. It’s basically human nature to do so. But I’m an incredibly non-visual person, so I don’t tend to notice much about covers. But that, my ability and willingness to not notice, is tied pretty strongly to privilege. I can walk into a book store and find people who look like me on book covers; I can find covers designed to appeal to people like me. So I’ve never had to notice.

Lately, I’m trying to do so anyway. I’m trying to read more books by and about people of color, and to take more notice of race in what I do read. I was late to catch the snap on this, but I’m trying.

Discussion #1: earlier this week, Tempest wrote about the cover of the new Realms of Fantasy. I’ve seen the magazine around, but have never picked it up; short stories aren’t really my thing. But basically, Tempest points out that Realms’ covers have always skewed towards featuring scantily-clad women; and now the magazine, about to be relaunched under new management, has… continued that trend, with a bare-chested mermaid on the cover.

Doug Cohen, the art director, responded.

You can insert a *facepalm* here.

Like I said, I’m not familiar with the magazine, but I’m also not shocked by the trend. I grew up on cheesy sf/f paperback novels, and there were hundreds more in my house than I ever got around to reading¹; scantily-clad women were sort of a mainstay. The answer is defensive, which I do get; after all, Tempest’s post was a direct calling out, and most people would respond defensively. But that doesn’t mean the post was not facepalm-inducing and soaked in privilege. Like, for example:

But there’s that cover, Doug. You can see her breasts! Hmm. There is that. But last time I checked, mermaids tend to shun clothes. And last time I checked, the chicks in chainmail covers are far more offensive than this. And last time I checked, nudity does occur in artwork.

I worked at a magazine just long enough to know that the art director has something to do with cover selection.² And if you’re the one selecting the art to include, saying that nudity occurs in art is pretty misleading. You’re deciding to use artwork with nudity and claiming “because that’s what art is,” as a reason; but you could just as easily not do that and … not have it be an issue.

And also, claiming “That other thing they used to do is more offensive than the thing that I did!” is basically a tacit acknowledgement that yes, what you did is part of the same problem. Because the problem isn’t that this cover had mer-boobs, or that a previous cover had chain-mail-clad ladies; the problem is that many covers have super-sexualized women on them, and that this cover is illustrative of a larger problem.

But what really gets me isn’t even that. It’s the bit about mermaids. Because last time I checked, mermaids were fictional. So please tell me what mer-person you found and show me the notes on the conversation about mer-culture and how bare-breastedness is part of that, and so clothes absolutely must be avoided in artwork to avoid an inaccurate portrayal of that culture. Because then I’ll nod along about how it’s totally justified; but right now, it just sounds like when an actual woman calls out a sexist trope, there are plenty of ways to avoid hearing her.

Controversy #2: This one is actually much nearer and dearer to my heart, because it concerns an author I do read, and, in fact, love: Justine Larbalestier. I met Justine at a signing a couple of years ago, and she was super charming.³ I bought her trilogy, and loved it; I particularly liked that of the three main characters, two were non-white (including the primary point-of-view character). Her next offering, How to Ditch Your Fairy, was also quite enjoyable; it’s set in a modern fantasy world, in which non-white was pretty much just the default.⁴

So this fall, her novel Liar will be released. In Australia, the cover looks like this. In the U.S., the cover looks like it does on the left over there. The controversy?

The protagonist of Liar is African-American. And the cover model used by Bloomsbury is really, really obviously not. The book isn’t out yet, so I had no idea; but earlier this week, Editorial Anonymous posted on it, and since then I’ve read a promo excerpt in which the character states, very matter-of-factly, that yes, she is black.

In response, Justine wrote two posts, both of which I loved and appreciated:

Why My Protags Aren’t White
Because a young Hispanic girl I met at a signing thanked me for writing an Hispanic character. Because when I did an appearance in Queens the entirely black and Hispanic teenage audience responded so warmly to my book with two non-white main characters. Because teens, both here and in Australia, have written thanking me for writing characters they could relate to. “Most books are so white,” one girl wrote me.

Because no white teen has ever complained about their lack of representation in those books. Or asked me why Reason and Jay-Tee aren’t white. They read and enjoyed the trilogy anyway. Despite the acres and acres of white books available to them.

Because I don’t live in an all-white world. Why on earth would I write books that are?

And, directly responding to the questions raised by the U.S. cover:

Ain’t That a Shame
Liar is a book about a compulsive (possibly pathological) liar who is determined to stop lying but finds it much harder than she supposed. I worked very hard to make sure that the fundamentals of who Micah is were believable: that she’s a girl, that she’s a teenager, that she’s black, that she’s USian. One of the most upsetting impacts of the cover is that it’s led readers to question everything about Micah: If she doesn’t look anything like the girl on the cover maybe nothing she says is true. At which point the entire book, and all my hard work, crumbles.

No one in Australia has written to ask me if Micah is really black.

No one in Australia has said that they will not be buying Liar because “my teens would find the cover insulting.”

Both responses are heart breaking.

This cover did not happen in isolation.

Needless to say, it’s a heavy post. And it, too, is a calling-out; while remaining respectful to a publisher she says is otherwise great, Justine calls out the self-fulfilling prophecy of claiming “black books don’t sell.”

For me it isn’t a question of whether or not I’ll read the book. I love that Justine writes books about people of color. I love her writing. She’s one of my favorite authors, and one of my favorite bloggers. I’ll buy the book. But at the moment, my plan is to figure out how to get an import of the Australian cover. Because I try to vote with my dollars, and I want my dollars to say that I like Justine Larbalestier and her books, and I don’t support racism.

Be Sociable, Share!

•