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Two more notes by readers on the how tablets, phones, and computers are changing the process of reading. Novel angle: these readers say the change may be for the good. First, from a mother of young children:
A quick observation just because I suspect that I have a minority perspective among your readership…
A kindle is an absolute lifesaver for reading when you're also trying to nurse/rock/otherwise care for a baby. The light weight means you can be reading War and Peace and still hold it up one handed for hours without getting tired, turning pages with a button instead of desperately trying to get gravity or maybe telekinesis to do it for you. And the wipeable, non-tearable screen comes in handy too. I'm sure my now-toddlers could figure out how to break the thing if they really put their minds to it, but I also know that they are naturals at trying to rip pages out of books.
To interrupt this note with an agreement: yes, of course, there are lots of cases where the lightweight, self-illuminating, no-page-turning, hold-with-one-hand aspect of Kindles, iPads, nooks, etc is a godsend. Back to the note:
Our three year old "reads" some books flipping through the pages (my elementary school teacher mother has commented on her advanced "Concepts of Book") and others sitting on her father's lap at the computer. She has inexplicable (to us) preferences for which books should be read which way. Both she and her one year old sister refer to my husband and I's e-readers as "books," so they get that we're reading when we look at them.
But there is definitely also value to the physical books we have on our shelves that she gets to page through occasionally. She likes the pictures in the cookbooks and biology textbooks, and it does seem like an important window for her into her parents' independent interests.
Between the World and Me is in our house, in hardcover, mostly because I realized I want my grandchildren to find it someday when they are sorting through my things and maybe know a little bit more about me and the point in history I lived in. But of course if that's the goal, its probably better to have one bookshelf and not a whole library.
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Here is a longer, complex defense of non-paper reading, from someone in the tech world who also obviously knowns the pre-tech literary world. (Fluerons, like this ❧, courtesy of the reader.):
I’ve been particularly interested in the questions of (a) how one ought to choose one’s reading, and (b) how much reading one ought to do. The conventional asserts to these questions are:
(a) First read what your work urgently requires, then read whatever you feel like reading right now. Repeat.
(b) As much as you can, or as much as you can stand
These answers cannot be correct or sufficient, but thoughtful people do repeat them and claim to follow them. We have rejected things like Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan or Mortimer Adler’s Great Books, and that’s not a bad thing, but we’ve little guidance to put in their place.
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Which costs more in the long run: the books we buy, or the shelves we buy to store them, and the rent we pay for housing those shelves? My house, at any rate, is completely overrun with books and magazines. Ebooks are books for which I don’t need to pay rent.
I have a forty-minute commute. Audiobooks keep me from snarling at the radio, fuming at Boston’s notorious drivers, and add fifteen volumes a year to my reading. Many audiobooks are exquisitely read, and not all the best readers are famous actors; I particularly recommend Katherine Kellgren, a master of accents.
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To interrupt this message too: I completely agree on the subject of recorded books. I find myself remembering and absorbing these even more vividly that on-paper books. On reason is that you can’t skim or skip ahead. The story unfolds at its own pace. Back to the reader:
On the subject of electronic media and reading to kids, the expert is a recent MIT PhD named Angela Chang who wrote a dissertation on electronic books to be read to very young children — books that help parents do a better job of reading with their kids than they might do otherwise. After all, not every parent is a great reader, and even great readers may not have the foggiest idea of how to read to kids.
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A few years ago, I read a weblog anecdote by a father whose first daughter had recently begun to walk. At some point, she toddled across the room to the coffee table, where she found a colorful magazine. After examining the cover, she tapped it several times, turned around, and said, "Broken!"
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Four or five years ago, there was a huge literary fracas on the question of whether one’s living room bookshelves should be occupied (a) by the books you’ve read, (b) by the books you’re about to read, or (c) by the books you want your visitors to think you read.
When traveling, I try never to be without a book; I hate to wait in line, and travel often requires waiting. [JF: Yes, the joke saying in our family before a trip to the DMV or jury duty is, “Take a book, it will be pleasant.”] At some conferences, I do sometimes choose what I carry in order to suggest that colleagues might want to read that book, or something like it; this doesn’t work for books about the conference topic but can be very effective in adjacent fields….
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Kids know their parents are reading, even if they’re reading on Kindles or iPads. Kids know what their parents are reading, if they know at all, from the dinner table. Looking at the cover is a doubtful guide at best.
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The book’s physical disclosure of your progress through the work is often a bug, not a feature, and some of the most powerful tools in the new media arsenal take advantage of this to surprise and delight the reader. This is also an advantage of film, which can end suddenly or which can appear to be reaching its natural conclusion and then spring suddenly in unexpected directions….
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I’m confident that books written to be electronic and taking advantage of the medium will let us do things we couldn't do before. Much of what "ebooks" do today is simply simulating paper, but we can do much better. I’m particularly interested in painterly narrative right now — narrative where the writer controls what she knows to be right but exercises looser control over matters in which different solutions present themselves. Just as Turner and Impressionism accepted that brushstrokes had a place in painting, that they were features and not mere flaws, we might come to see ways to let the reader’s inclination, the environment, or circumstance choose amongst possible readings.
Thanks to all; more ahead.
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