‘The Power Broker’ Is Finally Getting a Digital Edition. What Took So Long?

Robert Caro is obsessed with paper. He’s spent decades meticulously combing through the pages of archives. He writes his books on legal pads, then types them up on an electric Smith-Corona typewriter, making paper carbon copies as he goes. His mantra — cribbed from advice he received as a young investigative reporter — is “turn every page.”

Caro is such a staunch partisan of print that for years, he has refused to publish an e-book edition of “The Power Broker,” his revered 1974 book about the urban planner Robert Moses, whose bridges and expressways reshaped New York City, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and devastating entire communities along the way. An electronic screen would diminish the reading experience, Caro felt, and mar the precision of his line spaces and paragraph breaks.

But about a year ago, Caro, 88, relented. After prodding from his publisher, Knopf, he approved a digital edition of “The Power Broker,” which will be released on Sept. 16 to mark the 50th anniversary of the book’s release.

Caro conceded that the e-book might appeal to a new generation of readers, and perhaps to people who have been put off by the sheer mass of the book — which spans 1,286 pages and weighs in at more than four pounds — or to those who might prefer to cradle “The Power Broker” in the palm of their hand, on their phone.

“If you think that you’ve learned things about political power that would help people’s understanding about its nature and its dangers, you don’t want just one generation to know those things,” Caro said during a recent interview at the New-York Historical Society, where he visited an installation with material from his archives that celebrates the 50th anniversary of “The Power Broker.”