Niggers, Injuns and Huckleberry Finn

No, not the title to my most inflammatory blog yet, more the intro to a quick message regarding the new imprint of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by NewSouth Books. Put together by Professor Alan Gribben - eminent, no doubt - this offers all four volumes in the same edition for the first time and a little bit of specific text editing. It's the latter that's caused all the problems and negative reactions.

Professor Gribben has seen fit to change the terribly offensive N-word (Nigger) with the apparently less offensive word 'Slave' and the I-word (Injun) with 'Indian'. Frankly, when you've enslaved one race and stolen the other's country it's only right to be polite to them afterwards. The Professor's reasons are rather different however, he believes that the repeated usage of the offensive terms has led to the story not being read by African Americans -his full reasoning behind his decision is reprinted here.

I respect his choice, which he is after all free to make, more than many of the knee-jerk responses I've read. It seems reasonable to me that someone who has been on the wrong end of an offensive racial epithet may not enjoy reading a book - however good - which uses that epithet every page. You can explain the historical context of the words to people so effected until you're blue in the face, they're still going to feel bad reading Nigger or Injun constantly and just go and read a different book where it doesn't occur.

I'll let you into a secret. When I wrote the title to this blog I was a knee-jerk reactionary - historical textual purity was all I'd really considered. But after reading about it, looking at people's responses, and the Professor's eloquent introductory explanation, I've changed my mind. As long as pure copies are always kept, and people know how NewSouth Book's edition has been edited, I no longer see it as such a terrible thing. Who'd have thunk it?

There is a complete (virgo intacta) version of this book available for free on the Kindle store (software for viewing Kindle books is available for free on many platforms) - Niggers and Injuns best avoid. Gulp.

New toys - Amazon Kindle

I'd wanted an e-reader for a long while, I don't have the best of eyesight and the tightly set text of many modern book imprints had basically stopped me from reading. This also made e-paper an essential - other screens refresh themselves constantly and make reading a lot of text a chore. My other criteria was price, around £100 seemed fair to me.

So when Amazon advertised the new 2010 Kindle at price points of £109 (wifi only) and £149 (including 3G mobile data facilities) I literally pre-ordered mine on the day. As I have no need to download books on the move I saved my money and ordered the wifi only model. Both share a 6" screen, 4GB of memory and the same form factor.

It arrived on time, was unpacked and powered up. It had a protective sheet of adhesive plastic with some warnings about use printed on it.. soon removed.. and.... it wasn't printed, it was text on the Kindle screen. Text of quite amazing clarity and quality. It's not like text in a book, it's far better, like a very high quality print on very high quality paper. I worked out the DPI of the 16-shade grey-scale screen and it's just about twice that of the monitor I'm using now. Impressive stuff.

It is, of course, monochrome. That doesn't worry me, this device is for reading text and for that you don't need colour. While we're about it, it's not touch-screen either - everyone who has handled my machine has tried to touch it. Sorry, but not at this price-point. Not yet.

Whilst you can find e-books to read all over the web, the Kindle Marketplace on Amazon is your central site to buy Kindle books, newspapers, magazines and blogs. You can buy a book either on your Kindle or via your PC browser. It's all very very streamlined - buy on the browser and next time you turn on your Kindle it's downloaded and you can read in a few seconds. I should note that there are many free books on the Marketplace, mainly older texts but very welcome indeed.

Reading itself is a pleasure. Large buttons on the side of the device offer page forward and back (on both sides to cater for lefties and righties alike). You can select sections, bookmark them, make annotations (using the excellent keyboard at the bottom of the device), select words and look them up in a dictionary, send quotes to Facebook or Twitter and generally do anything you could do with a book and so much more.

The tricks don't quite end there either. Hit a key combination and your Kindle will start reading back your book for you. Okay the Stephen Hawking voice will never be as good as hearing a well spoken audio-book, but it's a cool feature nonetheless. In addition you can play MP3s and there's even a basic Web browser available which works reasonably well.

The Kindle is a quite excellent machine. I can't compare it with other e-readers, having never used one, but this device does everything I'd expect from an e-reader and a lot more I didn't. It's a well-made machine and makes reading easy. Using one text size above default I find reading books is once again available to me - and that's worth a lot.