How do you want to read?
(Photo of Tom Stoppard's book case, made by T. Anthony, via The New York Times.)
For the sake of travel and convenience, sure, even a Kindle is better than toting a book shelf with you on an airplane. But people still resist eReaders. Is it because eReaders cannot meet your reading needs, or because they're unaffordable and inelegant?
The media has brimming with iPhone and Android apps and speculations about eReading. Even literary blogs are tech-focused: Maud Newton dropped her iPhone in the subway, but didn't lose her place in her virtual book. And Chad W. Post ties up last week's "end of publishing" coverage with highlights from New York Magazine's comments (most of them are much more positive about eBooks than New York Magazine).
eReading devices haven't made an Android-esque debut, but they're chugging forward. Forbes presents a $850 iRex reader with a 10.2 inch screen. Plastic Logic has produced a one-pound, flexible eReader without Wi-Fi or backlighting (it looks sort of like one of those plastic covers Calvin put over his "Bats Are Bugs" report in the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon). The phones still have a leg up on these devices because they have names and color screens and do not cost $850.
The Sony eReader has been said to be difficult to navigate. The Kindle is distracting. And the iRex has received criticism from USA Today for a short battery life, slow loading, and incompatibility with Windows. In other words, eReaders exist but no model has achieved ubiquitousness; those that have managed to draw an audience are still clunky, slow, and don't have enough memory for major personal libraries. Until we all start to feel tech-lust, let's ignore these beasts and discuss something more important.
How do you take your eBooks? You can turn pages in Scribd's "Opening Up Education," or scroll down through Hewson's newA Season for the Dead. You can also scroll through scores of poetry at BlazeVox or Cory Doctorow's new book, Content. You can read Warren Ellis's comics online each week, or pay for them to be printed on dead trees. Do you want to read books in blogs embedded by Google, or perhaps on your iPhone? Here are a few questions:
1) Is it more convenient in a pocket-sized device like one of these phones, a Kindle-sized screen, an iRex-sized screen, or a desktop screen? Are you inclined to stick with paperback-sized pages when you read an eBook?
2) Are there certain types of books you would read on one screen rather than another? I assume there are - do you use The Pynchon Test or some other method to determine the best possible reading device for your material?
3) Are there certain features in one of these that really works for you? Specifically, do you care about turning the pages? Scrolling? Reading inside or outside a browser?
4) Do you feel more compelled to buy a digital book if it is scarce? Libraries seem to be wondering whether to loan one ebook out at a time, or take advantage of the infinite resources the digital world provides.
5) Is the problem that screens are too closely associated with your workplace, and that you're afraid of your reading being interrupted by popups, email, etc.?
6) Most importantly: Is there some mysterious intangible thing that books have and eBooks don't? If so, can you describe it? (That library smell and your great-grandfather's marginalia in your prized first-edition don't count.)
There has been a little buzz about this this week, and I'd like to challenge if:Book readers to contribute to the dialogue.
Bob recently mentioned that he is puzzled as to why people are willing to have music on iPods and movies on their laptops, but feel skeptical of books on a screen. His point was that these other events are very social; one hears music at concerts and sees movies in theaters, but reading is the most solitary of these events and seems the easiest to move from paper to eReader. Dan Visel has posted on the beauty of the "pause" button. "Pause" converted films - which one cannot control in a theater - into something the user could control thoroughly. And it seems to me that perhaps we are resistant to converting to a user-driven form when the form we have is already user-driven. But if it were done well, would you read it?
I read an article this morning that suggested eBook culture would provide publication space for things that don't deserve to be published, but if talented publishers are able to aggregate eBooks, we may be able to worry less about this problem (it would also benefit the publishing industry as a whole to cut down production costs, and would potentially provide for "risky" decisions - supporting new literary writers, for example, or books of short stories).
So lifting our heads above all these doubts: Is it a control issue, a content issue, or an aesthetic one? Or something larger about the way we connect to digital literature?
How do you connect to literature today? And how could you better engage with it?
|
