there's more to a book than its content

[cellio]

There are a lot of things that are good about the chumash (torah text+commentary) that our congregation uses. The editor (Gunther Plaut) pulled together a lot of good commentary, historic and modern, along with a more readable translation of the text. But two publishing-related decisions (or one publishing and one editing, perhaps) prevent me from using the book. First, they insert pages of commentary in the middle of each torah portion (usually multiple times). That's fine for study, but a primary use of a chumash is to follow the public torah reading, and while you're turning pages looking for the continuation, the reading is proceeding and -- especially if you're not fluent in Hebrew -- you'll find it hard to find your place again. (No, the insertions don't line up with the aliya breaks, either.) The other bad decision, and it compounds the first in a way, is that the paper is very, very thin. So it's difficult to turn one page; you may turn a few at a time without realizing it. So I ignore an otherwise-worthy book for reasons having nothing to do with content. Fortunately, Eitz Chayim was published a few years ago and it is an excellent chumash.

This came to mind Shabbat afternoon when I was reading Back to the Sources, a prerequisite for the course this summer. This book should have everything going for it -- a book about Judaism's source material from Tanakh to talmud to later works, about both how it developed and how to read it critically and in context. While the text is a little dry in places, it's interesting content. But the font is small, and the book is physically large (so there are many words on a single line, which is harder to read), and the paper is brownish rather than whitish -- and the result is that it's very tiring for me to read. Sigh.

Even if all the books I wanted to read were available electronically, suitable for a convenient, easy-to-use hand-held reading device, that wouldn't really solve my problem. That I couldn't use it on Shabbat is relatively minor, actually; the main thing is that I actually like books. I like to hold them, to insert post-it notes or bookmarks wherever I want (I rarely scribble), to use page numbers as navigational aids. I have a visual memory, such that I'll find something in a book (that I've read) more quickly than I'll find it in an electronic file, because of the context (including left/right page, how far down the page, how far through the book, etc). These just don't translate well to electronic media.

So I guess what I want is not electronic books but print-on-demand to my own specifications of font, paper, and page size. Pity that that will never be economically viable...


(On another subject, I've posted a round of responses to my previous post.)

Comments

[nickjong.livejournal.com]

Researchers at Xerox PARC are working on what I see as the holy grail: electronic reusable paper. In particular I'm eyeing the electronic book (not an e-book but a physical book with actual pages and cover) that can update the contents of its pages at will.

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, my enjoyment of the tactile sensation involved in holding a book makes me feel really old-fashioned. But it's nice to know that there are others who just like books. :-)

[goljerp]

Yeah, I wonder just what the publishers of the Plaut were thinking -- I refuse to use it because of those commentary breaks. Maybe they were thinking that Reform congregations don't read large chunks of Torah at once, or that congregants wouldn't mind flipping a lot of pages? Another thing that bugs me about the Plaut is that in the 1-volume version, the Hebrew's significantly smaller than the English. (I once saw one of the 5-volume set, where the Hebrew was larger; I guess that in order to fit it all into one volume that was liftable they shrank the hebrew and used the micro-fine paper.

Not that the Etz Chayim is perfect: it doesn't have a list of what the special torah readings/maftirs are. I mean, it's great that they have the special Haftorah for, say, Second day of Sukkot, but they don't say anywhere what the Torah reading for that day is, or the Maftir. The Hertz at least had in the special Haftorah section a citation of the torah/maftir reading for that particular day.

[sethg]

I have this vision of a Web site where you can fill out a form with details about which nusach your congregation uses, which optional parts of the service are included, etc., etc., and then order [fill in the blank] copies of a siddur or machzor in customized for your congregation, with your choice of Hebrew-only, bilingual, or bilingual-plus-transliteration. It would be especially useful for the High Holidays.

Artscroll has all the raw material for doing this, since they use a computerized typesetting system and they already pack their siddurim and machzorim with little grey boxes saying "at this point, some congregations recite the 29th psalm while standing on one foot". If they hired someone to code the Web site and the interface to a print-on-demand publisher, they could make a killing.