At More Intelligent Life, Megan Buskey expresses her doubt about e-books, pondering if it’s “possible to read anything serious on a computer, iPhone or Kindle”:
My concern is not really that we will lose books as physical objects (though I’d be sad to see the book go), but that that the concentration, care and reflection intrinsic to literary reading will diminish if physical books are to be phased out. Susan Greenfield, a prominent neuroscientist, recently made headlines with the hardly surprising claim that Facebook and similar sites mar the attention span and social skills of young people. Surely this effect will only be compounded if books become one of many things we access on all-purpose electronic devices. The Kindle isn’t there yet, but it seems poised to be so soon.
The irony is that I only saw this article towards the end of a very long day, so I opened it immediately from my RSS reader into EverNote, went away from my computer screen, loaded up the EverNote application on my iPhone (which synced immediately over my wireless network at home), and read her words in comfort elsewhere.
I can’t help thinking that the studies around “Facebook and similar sites” are not all that different to how scientists and psychologists were concerned about the effect of the television on my generation while we were growing up. Yet we are in an era whereby if Oprah talks about a book — or more recently, a certain e-reading device — its sales is destined to go up. Are we that worse off, really? I think it’s a bonus that young people are actually reading more even if they are consuming content differently and in smaller bites than what we may have been used to. It simply means the way important information is disseminated, written about and discussed will change, and we may well have to accept that we’re not going to be part of the generation that will succeed us.
As for whether it’s really possible to read anything serious on an electronic device: a couple of months ago, I started a casual experiment on looking at what kind of content I would conceivably read on my iPhone — I’ve got Classics, Stanza, and eReader installed amongst others for documents. I completely devoured “Pride and Prejudice” on the Classics app while on recent travels. Similarly, I am hooked on Hemingway using eReader. But when it came to some Dante, no amount of formatting adjustment could beat the experience of reading “The Inferno” in paper form — it’s hard to top my edition that has Italian on one side and English on a facing page. In any case, it has come to the point whereby if there’s a book I want, I’d search for it as an e-book first. Failing that, I would look into a paper version if it’s not available electronically.
My thinking so far is that stories that propel you forward will suck you in regardless of what you use to read them. It seems that poetry may not work so well on a small screen; my humble theory is that poetry needs whitespace to give weight to the words and help get the rhythm across. As for multilingual content — without more eloquent interface design — paper still wins. I’ve devoured blog posts, long articles, even academic papers on the iPhone without any trouble. As proponents of the e-book keep saying: it’s just great to be able to read anytime, anywhere — provided there’s electricity to keep our devices nicely charged.
(And if you are worried about children and critical thinking, have a listen to the Philosopher’s Zone podcast on Teaching Children to be Philosophers.
If our next generation can think and converse like this, the world may just turn out to be a better place. I’ll bet they use Facebook too. Who knows? There may well be book clubs appearing on Facebook before too long.)
3 Comments
I’m really torn on the whole e-book thing.
On one hand, I think e-books are great because so much paper is used in the production of books. I’ll refrain from making any pronouncements on the value of most books relative to the trees used to product them and instead say that e-books make a lot of sense from a conservation and efficiency standpoint, especially in terms of technical publications and frequently-revised volumes. In the e-book model, you might consider offering an “upgrade” of a book to a newer version for a discounted price, which helps you sell the book again and again, like software. Again, in technical and educational situations, this is invaluable and could create an even better stream of income for authors (and their publishers).
On the other hand, I do love holding a book in my hand. I haven’t tried an e-book reader yet, but I find it hard to believe I will enjoy the experience nearly as much, especially as I am a hardcover, first edition fiend. I also find that for technical references, having a print copy of a book is quite handy. I’ve tried using PDF versions of books, but, even with the search functionality and other nifty features, I definitely have a harder time reading and, more importantly, comprehending the prose. When it’s a trashy novel, that may not be a big deal, but we’re talking about technical material, that’s unacceptable.
The one thing I find upsetting about the current state of e-books, however, is the model Amazon has created for themselves. The fact that the author gets only a flat 35% of the sales price of the work seems crazy to me. And that’s for self-publishing. I don’t even want to know what we’d get for each sale of a book published through a major publishing house.
I suppose at some point I’ll pick up an e-book reader, but I don’t know that I’ll ever give up on print.
I read quite well on good books and on screen. I have not yet extensive ebook reading experience. On screen (laptop or big screens), I noticed a habit for long reading, I push away the keyboard and mouse if any, and I cross my arms on the table and just read. I put myself in a reading position.
I mostly can’t read paper books at home. I have to be in a cafe or in a transportation system. It’s how I came to love my long commute 2*1h30 a day in the last years. I will have to find a new strategy now.
I have a lot of difficulties to read a cheap printer paper book, as I guess I would have difficulty on a tv screen. BUT on a LCD screen it seems fine for me. The ebooks I have tried in shops have one disruptive element, the time it take to redraw the page (eink tech). but the quality of reading is nice.
The facebook study is not about reading but about attention span when consuming small bits of information changing rapidly.
@aarongufstason: that’s a really good idea about “upgrading” e-books, that we need to approach digital content much like we’ve done for software, and not just a one-off commodity.
I’d rather talk about literature than trashy novels :) But I actually think the difficulty with reading digital books is context: there’s too much going on a computer that it’s easy to get distracted, so perhaps it’s well worth trying to read content away from a computer in a comfortable reading context. I never thought I’d like e-books until I got sucked into reading a whole novel (”Pride and Prejudice”, at that) while on the road. And even then, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t give up paper books.
I’m actually somewhat more interested in ways we can couple both the digital and physical experience. For example, a way where I can swap between a paper book and a digital book if I wanted — without paying for two separate books.
@karl — Interesting that you find the re-rendering of the page distracting. The Classics app on the iPhone emulates a page turn — which I like, but I know it puts others off. Stanza does a very smooth scroll, or it can “blink” in the next page. I find that some degree of animation is necessary, almost as if your brain needs to register that the content is changing. Is the redraw line-by-line on books you’ve seen?
As for the facebook study — I didn’t want to focus much on it, but I was reading a few things around it, and found this article from 2003 that’s from a publication of the American Psychologists Association:
This researcher also looked into having televisions left on in the background around toddlers.