Geeks are creatures of the screen. Many, I have found, are also great lovers of books. I have peered into the homes and apartment of many and books usually adorn the walls and the tables. The exist in abundance. Though I am more or less paid to read for a living but these days, I don’t seem to the time to do extra reading and I often mourn the fact that I spend so much time getting scraps of stories and information from the net as opposed to delving into a great book, over the course of weeks and weeks (and as opposed to reading, often hurriedly but totally intensely, for class).
I do manage to get in some good articles and last night, I pushed through the heaviness of sleepiness to read a pretty interesting article People of the Screen by Christine Rosen.
Though a bit too alarmist for my taste, I enjoyed reading it, largely because it was written well and also brought some interesting questions and points to the table about the transition from a print culture to a digital one. One point, that I was not surprised to read, is the most avid of screen users (programmers, the digerati), are also avid readers. But among the less (economically) privileged, who have different educational relationships to books and who also may not have the time to read, reading in the traditional sense, is may soon be a more or less historical fact.
What I also enjoyed reading about and contemplating are the different material properties of the screen vs print book and the ways in which these affordances might create a different user/intellectual (almost existential, the author would argue) experience. For example, she argues that the emotional relationship to treeware books are more profound, or that reading a long novel (vs playing a video game) is about submitting your will–at least for a while–to the narrative and the story. I don’t agree with all of her assessments but I certainly agree that there are phenomenological differences between reading words on sheets of paper and the pages of a compact book, and then reading from the blue hue of a screen, often sitting upright, and whose text, at least for me, does not seem quite alive as it is when imprinted on bounded paper.
But I don’t think this necessarily has anything to do with some inherent properties of the screen. For example, writing on the screen does nothing but enliven text for me. When it comes to writing, I cannot imagine doing it any way but via the screen and the keyboard. I can play around with some words and erase with impunity. I can move around a whole paragraph here and there, split it into two or three and as such it feels dynamic and quite alive. I am sure I have lost, or there is something to lose, by not going straight from brain to pen but I never did all that much serious writing without the keyboard and so perhaps there was nothing to lose, no bodily transitional for me to undergo, and thus nothing to really mourn.
So, I suspect many readers of this blog are voracious writers and readers, on screen and off screen. Do you, can you read novels on the screen? If you love the printed book, why? Are you concerned about the loss of this medium? Or is there nothing to really worry about since technologists will eventually create a new digital medium that will surpass, in terms of a good user experience, the printed book?
There are screens, and then there are screens.
Reading a book while sitting in front of a desktop monitor is impossible, or at
least very hard.
Reading a book from a laptop screen is inconvenient.
Reading a book from a handheld device (such as a Nokia N810) is better than
reading a book on paper.
John Siracusa recently had a very good article about reading in the digital
age (The
once and future e-book) that explores some of these issues.
Comment by Marius Gedminas — February 8, 2009 @ 10:39 am
I apologise for the broken formatting. (Every blog should have a ‘preview’ button…)
Comment by Marius Gedminas — February 8, 2009 @ 10:40 am
I can’t read a book from a screen. I prefer paper all the way. Partly because it’s more comfortable but mostly because … why would I need to spend more time staring at a screen than I do already?
Comment by Andreas — February 8, 2009 @ 12:14 pm
There are days that I have HAD IT with the screen. Really. I leave my computer in a huf and puff and swear I will become that permaculturalist farmer I always wanted to be ;_)
And about hand held devices: I find it easier to read on my large screen still. I don’t doubt that better ones will be created but…. none have convinced me yet.
Comment by Biella — February 8, 2009 @ 12:56 pm
I much prefer reading novels in paper than on the screen, but I feel a big part of it is that when I’m at a computer, I tend to multi-task – I’ll respond to emails or IMs, I’ll have multiple pages up, I’ll try to read something at the same time as I watch some video, etc. etc. When I read a novel, my focus is much more intense. I haven’t tried a reading device, though I would be interested in doing so.
Comment by Benjamin Seidenberg — February 9, 2009 @ 10:55 am
I have been a voracious reader since middle school. I started with science fiction (how many geeks haven’t imbibed stories of far-away worlds?), then drifted in to technothrillers, Tom Clancy being merely the tip of the iceberg.
As I am in my mid-40s, reading on dead trees was the only option “back in the day” (Now get off my lawn!). However, about 2002, I got a Palm Tungsten E. I was in a job which was only appealing because of the economy, and one of the features was agonizingly long staff meetings. I learned at that point that people would just think you were taking notes, however, they would really get uptight if you whipped out a paperback in the middle of the meeting. About this same time, Baen Books started releasing free (SciFi!!!) e-books, as well as Project Gutenberg getting its feet under itself. So I learned how to read on the small screen…And never looked back. As a practical matter, the other thing that appeals to me when it comes to reading on a PDA, phone, etc, is that I can carry ridiculous numbers of books with me, of all flavors. I have a couple of hundred leisure books, plus the entire Linux HOWTO collection, documents collected by plucker, all of the relevant NIST Special publications I was using at the time and a variety of other docs.
I still have a hard time reading on a monitor or laptop, I believe because of the angle, however, I have been e-reading for so long, first on my Palm, then my Zaurus, then my Crackberry and now my N810, that reading on dead trees feels kind of strange. I’m still torn about the readers, such as the Kindle, because I don’t like single-use computing resources, except in specific high-end applications.
A good thought-provoking blog post.
Comment by Brad Alexander — February 9, 2009 @ 8:19 pm