Garth Risk Hallberg, writing at The Millions, provides a useful (or, perhaps, purposefully useless) guide to seven simple methods to write a book that is totally incompatible with The Kindle.

But first he quotes a from Balzac’s Lost Illusions in which Balzac bemoans the passing of movable type printing technology:

At the time when this story opens, the Stanhope press and the ink-distributing roller had not yet come into use in small provincial printing-houses…. [Now] the rapid spread of machine presses has swept away all this obsolete gear to which, for all its imperfections, we owe the beautiful books printed by Elzevir, Plantin, Aldus Didot, and the rest…

And here, in abbreviated form, is Hallberg’s list of unKindleable book qualities:

1. “Use Color”

2. “Use illustrations”

3. “Play With Text, Typeface, and White Space”

Hallberg remarks: “(I don’t think I need to point out the irony of the Amazon customer review for A Visit from the Goon Squad that finds ‘the ‘powerpoint’ chapter…extremely difficult to read on the Kindle.’)”

4. “Run With Scissors”

“John Barth‘s Lost in the Funhouse, famously invites readers to take scissors to it and create a Mobius strip.” Doesn’t work with the Kindle.

5. “Go Aleatory”

The Kindle doesn’t have a randomness generator.

6. “Put it in a Box”

For example, the critically beloved and intrinsically “physical” in nature Nox by Anne Carson.

7. “Pile on the end matter.”

Hallberg feels that Kindles have trouble with endnotes, though I don’t follow his logic on this one.

And so, in conclusion, we see (1) why the time-tested attributes of books, particularly experimental ones, resolutely resist the clumsy, uniform, unyielding conventions of modern technology, or (2) why to buy an iPad.