Read the fine print

MANILA, Philippines - Last Oct. 1, Amazon released the Kindle Paperwhite, the latest iteration of its best-selling e-reader. The new device, which has a grayscale touchscreen interface, boasts up to eight weeks of battery life. More notably, it features a built-in lighting technology that enables it to, in a manner of speaking, glow in the dark.
Glowing in the dark is also a selling point of another — for want of a better term — “reading device” that was released a day after the new Kindle. Unlike the Kindle Paperwhite, though, this other device is not battery-powered, let alone electronically lit. That’s because it is, quite simply, a book, a printed work made up of literally paper-white pages bound between covers. But what makes it glow in the dark, then? The covers themselves, front and back, which are designed with a phosphorescent rendering of the unbroken spines of books.
The book in question is Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, a curious book about books, both digital and analog, written by self-styled “media inventor” Robin Sloan. In an interview with the New York Times, Sloan makes a case for the book’s unusual, glow-in-the-dark cover: “I think in the year 2012, if you want people to forgo these super-convenient Kindle or Nook or iBooks edition, and get a big, heavy print book, you have to give them a really good reason.”
Indeed, authors and publishers now bear the onus of coming up with innovative strategies that are aimed at making certain books not so much unreadable on an e-reader as better read in print. And when these strategies do make it past the printing presses and into bookstore shelves, the results are often amazing and compelling.
In addition to Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, here are some other pretty good cases in point — and, boy, are they pretty.

‘Tree of Codes’ by Jonathan Safran Foer
The enigmatic cover designed by the indefatigable Jon Gray is reason enough to call Tree of Codes a work of art, but it’s what’s concealed underneath this cover that qualifies Jonathan Safran Foer’s fourth and more-ambitious-than-usual book as an objet d’art. That its title appears to have been formed by extracting some of the letters from that of Foer’s favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, is no mere happenstance. Tree of Codes actually expands on this idea of narrative alteration by partial deletion as it comprises pages of free verse that are created by cutting out most of the words from Schulz’s book.

‘The Invention of Hugo Cabret’ by Brian Selznick
Conventional wisdom dictates that the book is always better than the movie. Even in the case of The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, which was adapted into a universally acclaimed film by Martin Scorsese, this apparent truism still stands. The story of a clock keeper’s chance encounter with a pioneering filmmaker, The Invention of Hugo Cabret contains a combination of words and pictures, including old movie stills and Selznick’s own illustrations. This combination is calibrated so cleverly as to play out like a silent film on paper, which, by all accounts, is more captivating than a Dolby Digital 3-D film in an actual theater.

Practically anything written by Mark Z. Danielewski
Mark Z. Danielewski might as well be the most Kindle-resistant author there is. His latest novella, The Fifty Year Sword, which is re-released this month in a hardcover edition with tiny holes, uses a different color for each speaking character. Also, it has weird formatting. His second novel, Only Revolutions, likewise has weird formatting, the kind that requires the reader to flip the book over every so often to catch up with its “he said, she said” story. And then there’s Danielewski’s debut novel, House of Leaves. It also uses weird formatting, of course, but now it includes footnotes within footnotes as it tells a multilayered tale that seems to endorse David Foster Wallace’s claim that every love story is a ghost story.

‘Building Stories’ by Chris Ware
Given its dimensions, people could be forgiven for thinking that Building Stories is a box containing a board game rather than a book. But then again, even if they had thought the latter, they’d still be mistaken to some extent. Assembled by Chris Ware of Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth fame and released on the same day as Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Building Stories houses a graphic novel in 14 parts. Specifically, that’s 14 books, booklets, magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets. These contents, unlike those of Anne Carson’s similarly boxed Nox, are rather discrete, thereby allowing for an exploration of the architecture of loneliness that is engaging precisely because it’s aleatory.