Still, the dream of interactive books lives on, despite a series of digital disappointments ranging from hypertext fiction to CD-ROMs to experimental Web novels to current ventures in social reading. Previously, I wrote about the inherent tensions between interactivity and narrative in enhanced fiction e-books. Indeed, there’s little evidence that images, videos, sound effects or clickable doohickeys add anything of value in the eyes of most readers of prose fiction. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, the enhanced e-book of Stephen King’s novel “11/22/63″ contained a 13-minute film by King himself, yet only 45,000 readers were willing to shell out the extra $2 to get it, compared to 300,000 who bought the unadorned e-book ($14.99) or the 1 million purchasers of the print edition ($35). King’s publisher expressed doubts that enhanced e-books were worth the extra trouble and expense.

Nonfiction, however, is another matter. While some developers labor in vain to improve upon the immersive storytelling of novelists like King, others are taking factual material that might have once been published between hard covers and turning it into strange and wondrous new creations. The most successfully enhanced e-book is the one you may not even recognize as a book.

The first among these were introductory science apps like “The Elements” (used to showcase the iPad’s potential when the device was first released) and astronomy apps like “Solar System for iPad” and “Solar Walk.” A recent release, “Back in Time,” lets the user turn the hands of a cosmic clock and scroll through a series of images to explore a timeline of the history of the universe. All of these books — for that’s the category they’re given in Apple’s App Store — use touch-responsive 3-D animation and other model-like features to help the reader visualize concepts well outside their everyday experience: vast distances in time or space, the motion of the planets and the relationship between molecular structure and palpable objects. Technically, I know that the earth’s tilted axis as it orbits the sun determines the changing seasons, but “Solar Walk” allows me to see it happen.

The popularity of science apps like “The Elements” no doubt encouraged Apple to move aggressively into digital textbook publishing with its recent upgrade to iBooks. The iBookstore, with its too-broad categories and abysmal metadata, has failed to emerge as a contender among retailers of trade e-books. Apple now seems to be concentrating its energies on the education market. IBooks titles can incorporate an array of visual, audio and video features, which make it possible for publishers to create books like “The Elements” for older students. Sometimes the results add little more than eye candy, sometimes not. The sample book released with the upgrade, “Life on Earth” by E.O. Wilson, sports a lot of beautiful photographs and videos, few of which are particularly informative, but the animations of cell activity do help make the weird-looking structures of the microscopic world comprehensible.

Whole categories of routine instructional books are in the process of being digitally revolutionized. Cookbooks can include demonstration videos for beginners and advanced forms of recipe organization for more practiced cooks. You can better learn to lift hand weights or fix a car or do card tricks from a combination of text and video. There’s not much glamour or art in enhancing such practical titles, but there’s a lot of common sense. The linearity of stories may be fundamental to the pleasure they offer, but in books like these, linearity was always merely arbitrary, imposed by the print book form. Hardly anyone reads them one page at a time, in order, from cover to cover.

Even a work of substantive narrative nonfiction, however, can be genuinely enriched with some basic multimedia add-ons. The enhanced edition of Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” comes with several short videos featuring the Mumbai slum dwellers who serve as the main characters in that remarkable book. These films form a moving version of the photographic inserts traditionally tipped into the center of biographies and histories. You can’t read the book without wanting to know what these people look like. However, since most readers deciding which version to buy haven’t read the book yet, it will be interesting to see how many are willing to spring the extra buck for the edition with the videos.

Boo shot the footage on a Flip camera as part of her research. Once upon a time (say, two years ago), these videos might have been offered for free on the author’s or publisher’s website. But not every nonfiction author just happens to have a lot of documentary images and video on hand, waiting to be repurposed for publication. The great problem with any e-book enhancement is cost. Original artwork, video and animation must be commissioned or the right to use preexisting works obtained. That gets expensive — really expensive. Voice-overs and readings call for the skills of professional actors. The whole kit and caboodle then has to be inserted into the text, which depending on how well-integrated it is, may require the expertise of programmers.

Most authors and book publishers aren’t in the business of producing this sort of thing. Add to that a prevailing attitude among consumers that e-books ought to be cheaper than their print counterparts — no matter what extras they include — and there’s not much incentive for book publishers or authors to take the trouble. As understandable as this reluctance may be from a business perspective, it’s still disappointing. Imagine how much more enlightening, say, a book on popular physics or the military campaigns of Alexander the Great or the current fiscal crisis might be with a few well-considered moving or interactive images.

An example, and one of the few enhanced e-books considered a genuine success, is Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland,” an examination of the popular right-wing response to the counterculture of the 1960s. The enhanced e-book edition includes 27 clips, taken from CBS News archives, illustrating key events in a highly televised period of American history. Each clip is embedded in the page that refers to it. But bear in mind that the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, is a division of CBS, which surely made it much easier to obtain the rights to use those clips.

“Nixonland” started with a (celebrated) text, then added video. NBC News recently announced the formation of a digital book publishing division that works in reverse. It will produce titles on current events and personalities with the clips as the springboard, and then incorporate text from published books, NBC staff writers and freelancers. Companies who already know how to make videos, animated graphics and complex websites have the edge when it comes to publishing multimedia e-books. All they have to do is hire some professional writers. Traditional book publishers, on the other hand, have to figure out how to commission several types of visual media despite having little experience in working with anything but text. Besides, writing is cheap, right?

Not so fast. Complaints from app consumers about the weak writing in some otherwise spectacular digital books suggest that corner-cutting in this department is rife. Programmer- or designer-driven works often borrow text from Wikipedia and other public-domain sources, and this does not go unnoticed. One happy exception is the recently published “Skulls by Simon Winchester,” an app by Touch Press, the company responsible for “The Elements” and last year’s groundbreaking T.S. Eliot e-book, “The Waste Land.” The ever-debonair Winchester, bestselling author of “The Professor and the Madman,” not only wrote the text that accompanies the app’s 300 rotatable images of human and animal skulls (as well as artifacts representing the human head) — he also reads it. The result is informative and thoughtful as well as gorgeous and diverting. More, please.

Further reading

The Wall Street Journal on enhanced e-books

Though the story is short, Rushdie stops several times to ask the audience if he should continue. At each juncture, rapt listeners beg him to go on. After the performance is over, guests murmur words like “mesmerizing” and “transporting” as they turn back to their tablemates — and I’m one of them.

The event is a glitzy dinner organized by Booktrack, a company that publishes e-books with “synchronized soundtracks”; the occasion is the launch of the e-publisher’s first short story — Rushdie’s “In the South” — with accompanying music composed by John Psathas. (“In the South” is available for download now from Booktrack’s website.)

How do we dignify storytelling’s grand traditions in the Internet age? How can we use new technologies to enhance texts, while staying true to the most essential elements of the reading experience? Come to think of it, does that experience even need enhancing to begin with?

These questions preoccupy the contemporary e-book industry, and all who follow it. But after the reading, as I pull myself back to real life, I don’t need to wonder what exactly has been so special about the night’s performance. It wasn’t the tailor-made music — although that was beautiful — but rather the chance to hear an author’s tale quite literally in his own words.

In fact, the whole evening is something of a treat. I’ve been following Booktrack ever since the Rushdie project was announced, hoping to speak to the author about these musically “illustrated” texts. When I enter the dining room to check the seating arrangement, I’ve been seated at a table of reporters — next to the great man himself.

First, what does Rushdie — who has embraced social media wholeheartedly over the past several months — think of the Booktrack project?

“I had to be convinced that this was a good thing,” he says. “But actually, when I heard the music, I thought it really went very well.” Although Rushdie’s own instinct is to read without music, Booktrack’s presentation of his story eventually “won [him] over.”

“I always yield to [my younger son] in these decisions,” he notes graciously. “He said, ‘It’s super cool, dad.’ If he thinks it’s super cool, he’s right. What do I know?”

How does it compare to other settings of his work to music — such as the eccentric 12-tone opera version of “Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” which played in New York in 2005? (I’ve learned the hard way that twelve-tone opera is an acquired taste.) “[Booktrack] is different because it’s not dramatized,” Rushdie says. “In the case of Haroun, that was a whole opera. In this case, basically the reading is still something you do quietly by yourself.”

Rushdie explains that he was offered several chances to weigh in on the music as it was composed, but largely kept out of the creative process, since he found nothing objectionable in the draft material he was sent. “I just liked it. The composer was over in New Zealand, and he would email me clips of the music, and ask me what I thought — so I guess if I thought that something was really wrong, I could have said so. But as it happens, I didn’t think that. He was very generous; he was totally up for me saying whatever I wanted to say.”

“What I didn’t want it to sound like too much was special effects. I didn’t want it to sound like too literal a soundtrack — you know, with bangs and crashes in the right places.”

Close followers of the Booker Prize-winning author — or just readers of the New York Post — will know that he’s been making lots of brave forays into the world of new media. He joined Twitter last year, and his 140-character contributions to the social network’s endless conversation span the full range of literary culture (and much else besides) — from “Literary Smackdowns” to Kardashian-themed limericks. As much fun as he’s been having, though, he tells me that the move might not be permanent.

“I’m not even sure that I’m going to stay [on Twitter] forever. I thought I’d try it out, and it’s been what, four months, five months now. … I started doing it at a point where I was just coming to the end of a major piece of work, my memoir, and now I’m just beginning to think about the next major piece of work, which is this TV series I’ve got to write.” It might be harder to stay engaged with Twitter when he’s fully immersed in a project, he says. “But in between, I’m interested.”

What’s his Twitter philosophy? “You have to have a kind of an idea of how you use it. One of the things I didn’t want to do is to use it for personal trivia. I use it for stuff that’s in my head, or books that you’re reading, or some political thing that’s going on that you want to comment on — then I think it can be very effective. But you do have to have a sort of strategy of it.”

I point out that his strategy seems to be working — he has more than 205,000 followers — and that he’s known for being outgoing in the offline world, as well. Does he think of himself as a socialite?

“I don’t know about ‘socialite’ — I think I’m more sociable. I think a lot of writers are very private people. I’ve always found that, at the end of my day’s work, it helps me to get out of my head, and be amongst people, and do something else. I go back to my work the next day feeling fresher because of it. That’s a temperamental thing. I know lots of writers who, when they’re working certainly, sequester themselves, because that’s what works for them. Everybody finds out what works. At this point in my life, I’m pretty clear what works for me.”

Of course, Rushdie isn’t totally at liberty to travel as he pleases. Just weeks ago, perceived security threats forced the author to skip the Jaipur Literary Festival (protestors later even blocked his planned appearance by video-link). To many, it was a sign that the fatwa issued against the writer in 1989 might still pose real dangers. I ask if Rushdie feels any trepidation about socializing publicly here in New York. “No,” he says firmly. “It has really been over a decade since there was any real security issue,” he adds, downplaying even the threats from Jaipur. “I’m glad to be at this point, because it was serious for a long time. It was always less problematic in America, actually. Even in the bad old days, it was less of an issue here.”

The project he’s focusing on at the moment — since he’s finished his memoir and the screenplay for “Midnight’s Children” (now “deeply in post-production”) — is the pilot for a new Showtime series called “The Next People.” And though he’s achieved his greatest success as a novelist, he seems thrilled with the prospect of writing for a new medium.

“Once you’ve written feature films, [writing for TV] is not so different,” he explains. “You know, writing is writing — finding a way to tell a story. I just think what’s happening and succeeding in television drama in America right now is very exciting. … Because you’ve got cable, you have enormous creative freedom. All sorts of things that on the networks would be restricted, like language, violence, sexuality — none of that is an issue on cable. It means you can really write as freely as you want. And you have 12 hours, so you have an almost novelistic length of time to develop character, reveal narrative slowly, deceive people and then reveal things. It’s very much a writer’s medium, the drama series.”

When it comes to nominating favorite recent TV series, “Homeland” occurs to him immediately — as do other “obvious ones” like “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” and “The Wire.”

As Rushdie gets up to read his story aloud, and the evening draws to a close, I know one thing for sure — I’m looking forward to reading his memoir (though it’ll clearly be too long to have a soundtrack itself; “it’s a brick,” he laughs). Perhaps I’m particularly excited because, in the midst of a discussion about Cambridge University — where we both did our undergraduate degrees in History — he offers a tantalizing teaser. “I taught [E. M.] Forster how to play croquet on the day that Evelyn Waugh died,” he exclaims, adding playfully: “Just showing my age.”

I sat down with my iPad to read “The Yellow Submarine” with a friend’s 7-year-old twins, and within 10 minutes, we were embroiled in a conflict that captured the central, nagging problem with the enhanced e-book concept. Desmond liked playing with the interactive features — the digital equivalent of the tabs and flaps in a paper pop-up book — although few of these could steal his ongoing fascination away from the iPad’s system-wide “pinch to expand” feature. Nini was aggravated by her brother’s pinching, tapping and swiping, and shouted, “I’m trying to read the story!” (Neither one cared much about either the music or the videos, incidentally.) Instead of a cozy interlude of reading, we had a fight.

Attempts to invigorate books with video and other digital bells and whistles keep bumping up against this fundamental problem: You can’t really pay much attention to anything else while you’re reading, so in order to play with any of these new features, you have to stop reading. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, then the attentional tug of all these peripheral doodads is vaguely annoying, and if you’re not engaged by the story, they aren’t enough on their own to win you over.

The latest crop of enhanced e-books struggle mightily to overcome this dilemma. The vast majority of such books are kids’ titles, for the simple reason that literature for young children has always included images. The pictures give kids something to look at as the books are being read aloud to them, and this helps cement the relationship between printed and spoken language. Every children’s e-book offers a read-aloud feature in which a recorded voice recites the text. Most offer the ability to tap individual words to hear them spoken aloud. Parents understandably believe that these apps will help their kids learn to read — and that they make tempting, but still educational, alternatives to television.

The most celebrated children’s e-book at the moment is “The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore,” an app created by the Louisiana-based Moonbot Studios. “Morris Lessmore” is also a film, one of the five nominated for best animated short in the 2012 Academy Awards. It’s about a boater-wearing bibliophile who gets blown by a hurricane to a magical library where the books fly around like birds and quote their most famous lines. It’s not much of a story, but it looks fabulous. Nevertheless, you can tell a medium is in trouble when artists in some other form start making gooey nostalgic tributes to its inherent “wonder.” Although “Morris Lessmore” is sort of an e-book, it’s mostly a movie, apparently because only a movie can do justice to the glory of reading.

Moonbot’s follow-up, “The Numberlys” is even more gorgeous than “Morris Lessmore.” A visual tribute to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and set in a colorless, industrial world of numbers, it’s about five homunculi (looking just like the little men holding hands around the edges of Chinese pincushions) who invent the alphabet. “The Numberlys” allows its “reader” to help in this manufacturing project by shooting projectiles, bouncing objects and spinning devices to fabricate each letter. What the app illustrates is that the more sophisticated an enhanced e-book becomes, the more closely it resembles a game. Text is even more marginalized in “The Numberlys” than it is in “Morris Lessmore,” and while the result is charming, no parents should kid themselves that it will help teach their kids to read; it’s more likely to teach them how to play “Angry Birds.”

By now, the theory that the novel of the future will be a game has become almost venerable. That’s despite indications that — as the critic and author Tom Bissell pointed out in his book “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter” — narrative and interactivity are in fundamental respects incompatible. Where games offer the pleasure of mastery, narrative offers the pleasure of surrender. You can beat “Halo, ” but you can’t win “To Kill a Mockingbird”; the notion doesn’t even make sense. A “Hamlet” in which Hamlet can blithely decide to kill his uncle as soon as his father’s ghost tells him to is not “Hamlet,” and, furthermore, not that interesting. Part of the power of that story is its feeling of inevitability, the understanding that each event follows from those preceding it and ultimately derives from the nature of each character.

This potent sense of causality, along with a subtle balance of expectation and surprise, is the great storyteller’s secret weapon. When you find yourself caught up in a story like a swimmer in a riptide, unable to tear yourself away, chances are you feel immersed in another world. You know it’s not real, but somehow, for a while, it has become far more palpable than the reality around you. You can almost see the characters, feel the cold wind on their faces, hear the pursuing footsteps of the villain, and your heart speeds up. You may even become oblivious to your immediate surroundings. (Video games can create a similar sense of immersion via different means, which is one reason why the two are sometimes confused.)

Narrative constructs this alternate reality in your imagination, and narrative sustains it. What matters is not the story on the page — or the screen — but the story in your head. Interactive baubles pull a reader’s attention back to the screen, serving as a reminder of the thing you want to go on forgetting: the fact that all of this is just made up, words on a page. Some enhanced e-book publishers have cottoned onto this problem and as a result they’ve moved away from inserting video or clickable illustrations into their books, and in new directions.

Take, for example “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” an iconic Sherlock Holmes story frequently chosen by e-book enhancers as a giveaway to demonstrate their wares. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works are in the public domain.) Recently, I read the story three times, in three different enhanced formats.

The first, a Vook edition, represents one of the earliest stabs at an enhanced e-book. It presents the complete text with interspersed videos offering background information on Baker Street and Holmesian detection techniques. Some of these mini-documentaries are narrated by a man wandering around the streets of London, inexplicably dressed in formal evening wear and top hat and looking like a music hall performer, but you can’t expect “Masterpiece Theatre”; a problem with adding videos onto books is that it’s expensive to produce. Some of the videos are interesting, but only after you’ve read the story, which means there’s no particular reason why they should be packaged with it.

A newer company, BookTrack, dispenses with video entirely and sells books with accompanying soundtracks that keep time with your reading. If it’s a dark and stormy night in the story, the soundtrack plays rain effects. BookTrack’s accompaniment to “The Speckled Band” mostly consists of crackling fires, ticking clocks and chirping birds (for the scenes in the countryside). This is pleasant enough, but once I slipped into the tale (which works surprisingly well even when read three times in a row), I largely ignored it. Perhaps this indicates a kind of success — at least I wasn’t distracted from Holmes’ exploits. On the other hand, I was so intent on the old house of my imaginings that I didn’t need creaking floorboards and footsteps to make it more present. And as someone who resents overbearing movie soundtracks instructing me on how to feel about every scene, the music was simply obtrusive.

The most enjoyable version of “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” is published by Byook (I know, I know). It’s sort of an adult picture book that features both BookTrack-style soundtrack and marginal illustrations that soak into the page over the course of a minute’s reading. These reminded me of the elaborately decorated editions of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books passed down to my siblings and me from my father’s parents; hovering at the periphery of my vision, they really were atmospheric without being distracting. And because Conan Doyle’s story hangs on the layout of a room and of the rooms along a creepy corridor, a couple of the illustrations were actually helpful. An abridged version of the original story (heretical to purists, but I can’t say I minded), the Byook “Speckled Band” also features some fine original full-screen art in a style resembling paper cutouts, a little like the full-page plates routinely found in print novels during Holmes’ time.

Being shown the floor plan of the Gothic Stoke Moran manor house isn’t essential to understanding “The Speckled Band,” but it didn’t pitch me out of the imaginative space of the story, either. To the contrary; having to puzzle too hard over the text to visualize the configuration of a scene (as I did when I first read the story, at age 12) can sometimes break a story’s spell. When an author’s fictional world is very complex, and spans several volumes — as is the case with, say, George R.R. Martin — it’s easier to see how an enhanced e-book can help sustain the illusion of an alternate reality, rather than undermining it. Martin’s U.K. publisher, HarperCollins, has just come out with an enhanced e-book of “Game of Thrones,” with maps that track the characters’ movements and a glossary so readers can look up any character whose identity has temporarily slipped their minds — Martin has created over 1,000 of them.

For the most part, though, fictional narratives, when they work, don’t really need digital enhancements. When they don’t work, the enhancements can’t save them. Suzanne Collins’ series “The Hunger Games” seems piercingly vivid to her millions of young (and not so young) readers, even though none of the print editions of the books have contained a single image of her heroine. An expertly told story is all the enhancement most works of fiction require.

But, of course, not all books are fiction or narrative. It’s with nonfiction — a vast category of books, unfortunately defined by what it’s not — that the enhanced e-book offers the most thrilling potential and the most illuminating accomplishments. I’ll be taking a look at those next week.

But what if you prefer e-books? Because of my job, I rarely buy print books. (I get too many sent to me as it is.) Yet, for various reasons, I’ve found myself purchasing a surprising number of e-books to read on my iPad. At first, I automatically opted for Kindle books; the Kindle app for the iPad works great, and if I decide to switch to reading on my iPhone, it will automatically keep my place. Above all, Amazon has the richest and deepest online books database, where I can instantly find out whether a title is available in e-book (or audiobook) format, scan reader reviews and follow reader-generated tags to find similar titles.

Many people assume that if you want e-books, you’ve got to buy them from Amazon or another online retailer. They’re wrong about that. You most certainly can purchase e-books from your local independent bookstore. I’ve done it myself several times since I made my resolution to avoid buying them from Amazon if at all possible. Two of my favorite New York booksellers — Greenlight Books in Brooklyn and McNally Jackson in Manhattan — participate in the Google e-books program. You can visit their websites, find the book you want and purchase it through Google, which gives the bookstore a cut. The prices are comparable and the Google Books app works as well as the Kindle one.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t still use Amazon to find out about e-books. From browsing in the Kindle store, I learned that Cornelia Read’s “Field of Darkness” — a 2006 mystery recommended by one of my favorite authors, Tana French — is now available as a Kindle e-book for a mere $1.99. So I popped over to McNally Jackson’s website, searched on that title and found that the Google e-book could be had for the same low price, whereupon I bought it there. (Admittedly, McNally Jackson’s cut on a $2 book can’t be much, but I’ve bought full-price e-books from them as well. This is just the most recent one I learned about first from Amazon.)

I call this practice “reverse showrooming,” and recommend it to e-book aficionados who want to break their Amazon habit. Unfortunately, not all indie booksellers participate in the Google e-books program, and those who do aren’t always adept at highlighting the option. The small publisher Melville House Press is trying to boost the program among booksellers by distributing free, customized “shelf talkers” for the MHP titles carried by individual bookstores. (Shelf talkers are those paper notices attached to book displays recommending particular title, usually as a staff pick.)

Melville House’s shelf talkers include a QR code — one of those enigmatic squares of black and white dots — that, when scanned by a shopper’s smartphone, will take her immediately to the bookseller’s website and an order page for the book. Instead of seeing the book in the store and having to look it up on Amazon in order to buy the e-book, the code makes it even easier to buy the e-book directly from the bookstore itself.

Dennis Johnson, Melville House’s founder, says that so far only a few forward-thinking booksellers have taken the press up on its offer. Times are tough for brick and mortar stores and he says many of them view e-book sales as “not their core business.” Google’s eBookstore got off to a slow start after launching a year ago and there have been bottlenecks when it comes to adding new books to the system, especially for smaller publishers like Melville House. Yet booksellers and publishers have nothing to lose by making this un-Amazon, pro-indie option more visible.

Not surprisingly, you can’t read Google e-books on your Kindle (except for the KindleFire), which is one reason why the most popular e-reader on the market isn’t necessarily the best. You can read Google e-books on smartphones, tablets like the iPad, the Nook, the Sony Reader and a variety of lesser-known e-readers, some with e-ink, others backlit. There are also rumors of a forthcoming Google e-reader and — after a recent survey showed that consumers are interested in an indie-branded e-reader — the head of the American Booksellers’ Association said they are “aggressively in the process of trying to develop a device that our members can sell as well.”

But if you’re one of the millions of Americans who owns an iPad or its Android equivalent, there’s no need to wait. You can make the switch from Amazon to indie e-books right now, and do your part in the coming year to keep your town or city a more bookish place.

Further reading

Why it’s more important than you may realize to support your local independent bookstore

The site of the Google eBookstore can tell you how to read Google ebooks on your device

A video demonstrating Melville House Press’ Digital Direct Shelftalkers

Publishers Weekly on a new survey showing customer interest in an indie-branded ereader

The ad aims to show how this e-reader can improve your life, but this guy looks like he’s losing out. If I were a single man in my twenties and a hot young woman asked me to accompany her to a bookstore, I’d leap at the opportunity, even if I had no desire to purchase a book. Bookstores are generally acknowledged as enjoyable places to hang out. That’s why the characters in romantic comedies (“You’ve Got Mail,” “Dan In Real Life,” “Notting Hill,” etc.) are often seen together in bookstores. And so, as the commercial ended, I fumed to my wife about the manifold evils of a society that encourages people to use electronic devices in order to avoid such things as intercourse with other human beings who are actively seeking one’s companionship. And yet, there was an element of hypocrisy in my ranting and raving.

I buy several hundred books a year, but most of them are purchased from Amazon.com. There are at least a half dozen bookstores in my city (Sacramento) that I visit regularly. But while browsing a shop, I’ll usually compile a list of all the titles that interest me so I can go home and order cheap used copies of said books from Amazon.com (or, more accurately, third-party sellers who hawk their used books via Amazon’s website). Unlike the young man in the commercial, I enjoy getting out of the house and perusing bookshelves in the company of my fellow book-lovers. But, in most cases, I ultimately purchase the book online; so the money leaves my bank account and travels across the country where it does no good for the Sacramento economy. I am a 53-year-old man who complains about how e-books are making the world a less social place, and yet, when it comes time to purchase an actual book, I do pretty much what the young man in the commercial did — I order it from a distant site via an electronic device that provides me with no personal interaction with the seller.

I defend my hypocritical behavior by citing my poverty. I am among the most impoverished of freelance writers and I also have an insatiable literary jones, which causes me to purchase books even when I can barely afford groceries. If I didn’t shop at Amazon, my annual book expenses would probably be double what they are now. Amazon usually sells new books at 20 to 40 percent below the publisher’s retail price. Used books are an even bigger bargain. I can often find used books selling at Amazon for a mere 10 or 20 percent of their original price. And if I save these items in my shopping cart until the total cost of my purchases is $25 or more, I typically won’t have to pay for shipping, either.

And so I turn my nose up at people reading their e-readers. I think to myself how sad it is that they’ll never know the thrill of coming across a photograph or bookmark or airplane ticket tucked away in the pages of some used book. But I really shouldn’t condemn them for eliminating the bookstore from their reading experience. Although I still visit these brick-and-mortar shops, I don’t support those establishments with my money any more than the e-reader user does. In the end, we both end up ordering books by clicking a virtual button with the word “purchase” printed on it. Our money disappears from the local economy, and those valiant booksellers who still maintain a physical presence in our communities despite the dwindling returns of such operations are once again penalized for their commitment to the personal touch. The only difference between me and the pathetic young man in the e-reader commercial is that I would never — ever — turn down an offer to accompany an attractive young woman to a bookstore (although, at my age, the woman would likely be one of my granddaughters).