I’ve seen this a couple of places now, and I just don’t understand it. First, Alan Jacobs wrote about how easy note taking is with his e-reader in his book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
First, I just don’t find it as easy to keyboard notes into the text with a touchscreen or highlight with my finger as I do to write or highlight by hand. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but hunting and pecking on my smartphone or ereader is frustrating and distracting and I’ve been known to just skip over taking notes or writing down questions while reading ebooks. Highlighting is equally frustrating for me- it could be a lack of coordination but I never seem to be able to highlight exactly what I want- I get extra lines, or miss words. It’s a complete disruption for me. I don’t think it’s just because I’m a digital immigrant- I asked a recent college graduate about this, and she had the same issues. If this is frustrating for me, an adult, then what would it be like for kids? As for browsing through the Web to explore words and ideas that I encounter when I’m reading, that doesn’t mean to me that it’s so much an interactive experience or an “advantage” as it is a distraction from the narrative. I think it’s great to have that as a resource at hand if necessary, but to browse further and further away from the book without actually interacting with the text you access doesn’t seem like an advantage… it seems like a reason you might never actually finish the book. Because, as Alan Jacobs notes, we do live in an age of distraction, which can make deep reading difficult indeed.
Jacobs’ argument for the advantage of ebooks over print is, in fact, that ebooks (or at least Kindle books) enable concentrated reading because features like Web browsing are difficult to access, and (at least in Kindle books) the lack of page numbers means readers are less likely to flip back and forth. I tend to agree with this so far. I haven’t been tempted to leave the text to browse the web (but this could have to do with both the kind of reader I am and the kind of ebooks I read) and the location numbers that the Kindle uses make it very difficult to go back. I find the second more annoying than advantageous because I read very quickly and one of the disadvantages of reading quickly is that I end up skipping over sections of text that I need to understand the story going forward. But the lack of page numbers does mean that you keep going forward, and since you aren’t cued by the physical length of the book as to how much more there is to read, you are more likely to keep going. When you’re in the flow, which happens easily when there are no defined physical limits, it’s hard to stop. If you love being swept up in the story, that’s a definite advantage. Unless you’re like me, and reading is like an addiction, where setting limits is REALLY important (especially when you’re reading, say, Outlander).
Speaking of Outlander, there is, I think, one advantage that I have discovered ebooks have over physical books, and that’s flexibility. In reading Jacobs’ book, I was convinced to turn back and look at some of the “classics” that I hadn’t touched since high school. It was a lot more comfortable to reread Oliver Twist on my smartphone than it would have been to carry a clunky physical copy around- Dickens was paid by the word, and his books aren’t short (and neither is Outlander– you could break your wrists carrying around the physical copy). It’s also probably unlikely that I would have sought out a physical copy of The Canterville Ghost after seeing the movie
Well, now I’m rambling a bit, so to return to my original point- is it really a “dramatic advantage”, as McKenzie describes it, to be able to wander away from the book in midstream, even to explore the events and ideas you encounter? In my personal experience, no. Is note taking and highlighting easier and more organized? Well, my experience is that it’s not easy enough for me to discover whether it’s a better way to organize my thoughts. Do ebooks, as Jacobs suggests, enable more concentrated reading at a time when that’s becoming more difficult? I think they can, and that’s an overall advantage for readers. Can ebooks encourage us to try new genres, different lengths of texts, or more challenging works? I think so, if we consciously attend to what and how we read.
But when it comes to really paying attention to what’s between the covers, I’ll take the physical book, pen and highlighter in hand, thank you very much.
Anya
June 1, 2012 at 4:24 am
I agree with much of this. However, there are a few advantages to ebooks which I’d like to address. First of all: you can search them. I’ve spent hours and hours trying to relocate that one passage I knew was there in a printed book when I was writing about it. Note-taking doesn’t help because this is often a passage I didn’t think was important at the time I read the book but only thought of later.
Secondly: I don’t like to mark books with highlighter or take notes in the margin for the simple reason that it changes your reading experience when you reread the book (also, I borrow a lot of books and you don’t want to mark those, right?). I like to return to a book with an open mind, not primed by what I thought was important the first time around. So, what I do instead is put sticky notes in important places. Lots of sticky notes. Sometimes more sticky notes than there are pages in the book so they become hard to manage. This is why I bought an ereader with a small keyboard on which I can type short notes reasonably fast.
Thirdly: I love that I am able to lug around half of my library on a tiny device. I bought my ereader between two trips to the US and on the second one my luggage was substantially lighter because I didn’t bring a single physical copy of a book (although I had about 30 books with me on my ereader).
All of the above applies to books I read for work or enjoyment. However, there is a definite advantage to printed books and that is the simple pleasure of touching them, opening them, feeling the paper – no ereader will ever be able to emulate this kind of haptic pleasure for me. So, I guess what I’m saying is: the ereader is a great tool for work (like a laptop or a mobile phone) but that is all it is.
Kirsten
June 2, 2012 at 2:03 am
Anya, I’ve definitely had the time-consuming experience of flipping through pages trying to find one particular passage, and while I haven’t used that feature much, I agree with you that it’s valuable (especially when writing book reviews). And absolutely, when you’re using someone else’s books, you don’t want to be marking them up, but that becomes much less of an issue anyway with ebooks since it’s difficult to lend most of them to anyone else (I have ended up with more ebooks than I really need or want because of this).
The sticky notes strategy is a good one that’s recommended by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudivis for reading comprehension and engagement, but too many sticky notes can become overwhelming. If you take notes that are that extensive, though, it seems like that would be really disruptive of the narrative!
I have found that with books that REALLY challenge me, and that’s usually nonfiction, that I need to either take notes right in the margins and physically highlight passages, or use sticky notes, or when I come back to the text I have to redo the work I have already done in trying to understand the text. Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain was so dense and technical to me that if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have been able to go back and read with any kind of comprehension later. It’s great to approach a book as if it’s a fresh text if it’s a reread of something you read at an earlier time (going back to Sherlock Holmes, say, after years without reading any of Conan Doyle’s stories)and hopefully that’s the case with most fiction that you’d WANT to go back to, but sometimes it is a real advantage to me to be able to just get it down on paper.
I just read an article in The Nation that stated that one of the greatest areas of growth in the purchase of ebooks is in genre fiction, and one thing I notice about genre readers is that they read ravenously. Many of the books are probably one time reads. I’d have no room in my house if I bought a physical copy of every book I read- the ebook is definitely freeing in that way! A visiting friend just recalled a trip we took overseas where I zipped through an entire suitcase of books on the plane. I can’t imagine doing that today! I still don’t trust my ereader not to fizzle out in the middle of a story, but I carry a lot less weight around with me now!
I do think that ebooks are changing the reading experience, but it’s interesting to see how divergent the viewpoints are on how that’s actually happening. Are ebooks emblematic of living in an “age of distraction”, now that ereaders have social aspects and it’s possible to easily (according to McKenzie) browse the Web from within the text? Or do they actually enable readers to concentrate more deeply on what they’re reading, as reading has much of the time now become just skimming? The ereader is definitely a tool, but what exactly is it doing to the way we as readers experience text?