Here’s an excerpt from “How do e-books change the reading experience?”:

Physical, paperbound books provide a sense memory that has informed so many of my most important encounters with storytelling: sight, smell and touch, yes, but also the experience of anticipation, progress and accomplishment. Not to mention recollection. To call to mind a certain Toni Morrison book has as much to do with the care she took in crafting it as the physical sensation of reading it. Twenty-five years after I first read “Song of Solomon,” I still remember the exact location of a particularly devastating, gorgeous passage about the emotional violence inflicted by Macon Dead on his wife and daughters. (It was situated toward the beginning of the novel, at the bottom of a left-facing page.)

Lastly, I feel a certain disappointment in the electronic format’s performative limitations. Anyone who owns and enjoys books understands that the volumes we keep on our shelves — and in our hands on a busy subway — tell several stories. There’s the author’s story, which is the actual text; there’s the publisher’s story, which has to do with the choice of format and design; and, finally, there’s the reader’s story — what a particular book telegraphs about one’s education and tastes. Who or what we choose to read can be as telling as the clothes we wear, and an e-book feels like a detail withheld, even a secret kept. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it probably explains why the three books I own about dealing with a loved one’s alcoholism are on my Kindle, not my bookshelf.) Unlike the shopworn cover of an early paperback edition of “Native Son” or the crisp jacket on the latest Donna Tartt, Kindles and Nooks tell others little to nothing about their owners, except that they enjoy a certain amount of disposable income.

At the very least, physical books provide a convenient and visible distraction: What else are wallflowers at pretentious cocktail parties supposed to busy themselves with? Oh, right: their iPhones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/books/review/how-do-e-books-change-the-reading-experience.html?pagewanted=2&hp

An astonishing number of comments come from readers with disabilities.  Here’s a particularly moving example:

My left hand remains very balky after a small stroke two years ago. It seemed for a while that my leisure activity of choice was a thing of the past: page turning became a real chore and it was nearly impossible to keep a book in my hands for more than a minute before it landed on the floor. Enter Kindle rigged with a Velcro strap. I flip pages with my thumb and have no trouble keeping “my book” at the perfect reading angle. It is lighter than almost any book available in “dead tree” format and even my old Kindle is visually sharp. I understand the appeal of paper books but find the objections to e-readers irrelevant.

Does anyone else have the feeling, with an e-reader, that you are being turned into a revenue stream for Amazon?  Not that that isn’t also true of print books as well.  An additional concern is the proliferation of books on Amazon like the one linked to the url below. It is nothing more than a 20 page research paper, with sources like wikipedia, put together in a day or two.  I made the mistake of purchasing it.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Real-Life-Mary-Poppins/dp/1482075032/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1388957779&sr=8-6&keywords=p.l.+travers

Finally, on two occasions, Amazon has sold e-book versions of The Annotated Peter Pan, unauthorized copies made and sold on Amazon until I wrote in to ask to have them removed (and they were).

There’s an old chestnut in Hollywood about how no one in the town reads.  If that’s the case, Saving Mr. Banks is the exception that proves the rule.  The depth of Emma Thompson’s understanding of P.L. Travers’s character is astonishing, and it’s clear that she took the role seriously enough to read, while the scriptwriters actually did research.  It’s heartbreaking to hear what one of the scriptwriters reported–and the brilliant Tom Hanks has just the right antidote to the sadness:

Last night, when we were doing a Q. and A., Kelly [Marcel] said [Travers’s] grandchildren had said she’d died not loving anyone and nobody loving her. At which point, Tom burst into song.

You sang? Tom, what did you sing?

Tom Hanks “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.” I needed to Disney-fy up the sad ending. [Laughs.] 

And here’s Tom Hanks in that same interview about Saving Mr. Banks in the NYT, with fascinating insight into how Disney came to make the film.

Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, called and] said: “Look, we have a bit of a circumstance here. We have to make this movie about Walt Disney. We didn’t develop it. It came to us from somewhere else. It’s a great script, and if we don’t do it, that means somebody else might be able to do it, and we’re going to look heartless. But if we quash it, we’ll look like we’re trying to hide something. So will you play Walt Disney?”

http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2014/01/04/movies/awardsseason/index.html

Jerry Griswold reviewed the movie, and he reveals a darker side to the feel-good ending, which enables the corporate to triumph over the creative.  Included in the review is a link to his extraordinary interview  with P.L. Travers in The Paris Review.

http://sdsuchildlit.blogspot.com/2013/12/saving-mr-banks-but-throwing-pl-travers.html

 
The odd thing about Saving Mr. Banks is that in this contest between the creative side and the corporate side, we’re supposed to sympathize with corporate. We’re supposed to join in patronizing the writer. Over all, someone seeing the film would reasonably conclude that Travers was an extraordinarily difficult person and Disney a nice guy. And alas, given their reach, it may be the Disney folks who get the last word.

Maria Russo interviews Ransom Riggs in Santa Monica:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/books/ransom-riggs-is-inspired-by-vintage-snapshots.html

Mr. Riggs’s attraction to haunting photographs eventually became the catalyst for his first novel, “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” (2011), a surprise best seller, whose plot was inspired by the dozens of vintage snapshots featured in its pages, which add to its uncanny atmosphere. With the film rights to “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” sold to 20th Century Fox (Chernin Entertainment is aiming for a summer 2015 release), and “Hollow City,” the second book in a planned “Miss Peregrine” trilogy, to be published in January, Mr. Riggs is beginning to feel at home in a career he calls “accidental.”

It was in 2009 that Mr. Riggs, a graduate of the University of Southern California’s film school, stumbled on a trove of vintage snapshots at a flea market and felt the stirrings of an obsession.

“I realized I can find these amazing little lost pieces of art and be my own curator and rescue them from the garbage,” he said, “and they’re a quarter each.” Long a connoisseur of abandoned houses and mysteriously desolate landscapes, Mr. Riggs said he was drawn to odd or disturbing photos that suggested lost back stories.