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Tuesday, September 18, 2007
ebook, ibook, ebook, ibook, oh.
I wonder if Cory Doctorow is right:
I don’t believe that most readers want to read long-form works off a screen, and I don’t believe that they will ever want to read long-form works off a screen. As I say in the column, the problem with reading off a screen isn’t resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it’s that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work impractical.
Doctorow’s argument is that giving one’s books away online for free does not harm sales, and indeed actually encourages people to buy hard-copies, because people will only taste the product online, not consume it whole (the online reading experience being so distractive); and that having tasted they may well think, I’d like to read that, I shall go to the bookshop and buy. The question: is he right that people don’t read onscreen because onscreen is too distracting an environment?
I tend to think he’s right with the first part of his argument, that the problem is not ‘resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub’. Having spent a lot of money, and dedicated a lot of space, to my CD collection I was disinclined to dump it in toto and store all my music in digital form. But then I took the plunge (I have an iriver, which I consider immensely superior to the iPod) and now I can’t imagine how I put up with such a wasteful and onerous method of music storage as CDs for so long. I could certainly imagine doing something similar with books; I’d buy an iReader, codeX, bookloader, ePod or whatever these devices will be called, store everything I need on a block-sized piece of memory hardware rather than on, well, three whole rooms of my small house. The reason I don’t is that such devices, though pretty, are expensive in themselves, and more to the point that downloading a DRM-hobbled title to one costs about the same as buying a hardcopy of the same title from the bookshop. That’s a disincentive.
Anyway; not to get distracted from the distraction argument—certainly, I’ll concede that distraction can stop me working. I do most of my writing on a cheap laptop that lacks internet access, and I write best when I’m out of the house, usually in a coffee-shop. It’s posy, I know, but I can’t help that. If I try and write on my desktop the internet will surely tickle my brain with a thousand distractions, and I do tend to find myself frittering the time away.
But that’s writing. Reading, though? I’m not so sure. Here’s the thing: there are very many times when I find myself reading in environments that are immensely distracting, and yet without being distracted from my reading. I don’t just mean on the train, where the distractions are limited to gazing moonfaced out the window, or eyeing up fellow passengers; I mean, to name only three, (a) reading in the sitting room whilst the TV is on and children are watching Ben 10, (b) reading whilst walking down the public street, risking thereby collision with other pedestrians, lampposts, cars and so on, and (c) reading a novel held in my left hand whilst cooking with my right. I was going to add a (d), ‘reading whilst driving a car’, but then I thought that might make me look like I’m a nut, and get me my license revoked. (What I mean is: there being books to hand, say on the passenger seat, and having pulled to a stop at a red light, I may well flip the book open and read a few sentences before the light goes green. That’s not crazy behaviour, is it?)
Comments
I don’t buy the distraction argument. You’re right that one can read despite distractions. But from the other side, I’m often distracted from reading hard-copy books by all the other books. The books I’m currently not reading always look so interesting. As a result, I get much of my best (most focussed, most attentive) reading done not in my book-filled house, but in the park, coffee-shop, pub, on trains, etc.
If I had an iRead or whatever, I think I’d have to slow down the change from one file to another, just to discourage skimming and flipping between things.
Sam: you don’t buy the distraction argument, but then you say that if you had an iRead you would be distracted ... or are you hovering somewhere in the middle?
The distraction argument might have some validity, though I think that would vary widely between individual users and their habits. I do disagree with Doctorow´s dismissal of issues like resolution and eyestrain, though, and in doing so I disagree with Adam´s ipod (or iriver) comparison. Adam, while you are correct that digitizing audio files makes them much more managable and accessible (and minimizes the space they take up in your house), your actual interface with the music has probably not changed: I´ll warrant that you connect your iriver up to the same speakers and headphones that your CD player drove. With digitized reading material the human interface is greatly changed. Whether or not that´s a bad thing is a matter of personal choice, but I for one still prefer the aesthetics of “analogue” reading. The advantages of storage efficiency and accessibility still hold of course, though frankly I think being able to haul my entire library around with me in a convenient, portable form would only result in my being even more pedantic and annoying to the general public than I already am. Though that does have its appeal…
I half buy the distraction argument. In fact, I either blogged something like it myself a while back, or thought it, or mentioned it to one of the cats, or my wife, or I just dreamed it. These days I have trouble telling the difference between blogging and dreaming. I think blogging is the one with the RSS feed.
I force myself away from the computer and tell myself: read a book for 3 hours. I have ADD. I worry that, when the e-book format gets better, a lot of things will get better. I’ll take better notes. I’ll cut and paste and organize my thoughts about what I read better. But I’ll also be more distracted.
I think it would actually be useful to have an application that functioned like a time-lock on my internet access. Click it and there’s no way to use the internet for 3 hours. Then it unlocks itself.
FYI: not all eBook readers are DRM-crippled (check out the iLiad from iRex)—evidence that they *are* all cripplingly expensive though. (The problem of course is finding non-crippled books to download… but for those who read lots of papers, a hassle-free PDF display sounds pretty good.)
iLiad: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILiad
I buy a little bit of Doctorow’s argument: you get distracted very easily from long-term focussed work if you’re online. But why should that stop you coming back to the book you were reading? Isn’t that what you do when you get distracted by incoming mail in the middle of writing?
The big advantage for me is the shape and heft of a book. Small and light enough to read sideways lying down (unlike a laptop) but large enough to fit a reasonable page of text (unlike a Palm or similar).
Personally I think that most people don’t read onscreen because most screens sit on desks (even laptops) and that’s not a comfortable long-term reading position.
Enough distraction! Back to my reading…
Sorry, I was unclear: I meant that I don’t think distraction is a distinguishing feature of reading things on screen. Both kinds of reading are subject to distraction; distraction can be resisted (sometimes) for both. So I think Doctorow’s wrong, and iReading could take off once the technical issues - resolution, eyestrain, bathtub - are solved (whether or not it actually does take off probably depends how easy/cheap it is to get content). Right now, though, books are better reading technology than my laptop.
But I’m talking off the top of my head here - Doctorow certainly knows a lot more about this than I do. I like John’s timelock idea…
Nice piece by Andrew Marr in the Guardian here.
Marr makes the good point that electronic readers don’t (yet) have the aesthetics which so many bibliophiles love: heavy paper, the particular smell, etc.
Sam: I’m not convinced by the Guardian article (although the weight comparison is great)—yes we love books for their bookness, but LP-heads love their vinyl, I don’t think that’s a factor any more in the economic decisions music labels are making.
I’m with ChrisB on the advantages of analogue reading, although I suspect that’s an area folk like iRex are putting lots of effort into (there’s already note-taking and handwriting-to-text software for the iLiad, although they make you pay extra for it). I’m convinced though that the most significant of those advantages is portability, not because you want to read your books in the bath but because you want to step away from your desk, just for a moment, and take the book with you.
I’d love to see a iPod Touch have some kind of reader software if it allowed me to highlight stuff and generally right “WTF!” and “YES!” in the margins as my annotations tend to. I read a hell of a lot of stuff off screen, including mighty tomes on economic methodology and John Ruskin and although irksome at times (in terms of absurdly limited copy and paste and flipping between page options) because our library in its wisdom only has certain books electronically.
A good example is the book Wittgenstein, Mind, and Meaning: Toward a Social Conception of Mind which allowed me a good comparison. I read a good chunk of it on screen, then when the pre-essay panic set in was glad to find a copy of it in print in the library. It was in fact a relief. Which did I enjoy more? The book, because I could flick quickly and skim and see if stuff was relevant, as well as carry it around. This said, had my reader been a nice iPod and not ebrary which is crap, the experience could have been much the same.
I also think that navigation is a big issue. Despite being able to “jump to” and “find” pages, reading on a screen is much like reading on a scroll. One of the biggest advantages the book had over the scroll is that they allowed readers flip back and forth quickly, to thumb through them, etc.
It kind of looks like everyone has her own particular reason why readers won’t read long-form works on their computer monitors. Mine is that the book as an interface/technology creates an environment readers are looking for that a computer screen can’t. Could Georges Poulet have written this:
Unheard of, first, is the disappearance of the “object.” Where is the monitor that floated before my visage? It is still there, and at the same time it is there no longer, it is nowhere. [...] For the monitor is no longer a material reality. It has become a series of words, of images, of hotlinks, of ideas which in their turn begin to exist. And where is this existence? Surely not in the LCD. Nor, surely, in external space. There is only one place left for this new existence: my innermost self.
My chum has read the Aubery Maturin and Hornblower series in their entirety from a Nokia 770 and numerous sci-fi novels too. In fact I rarely see him with a proper book since he discovered the gizmo. He probably has many titles queued in azureus right now.
I think it’s a case of some being more easily distracted than others. Personally, I like to limit my gadgets to single functions so I’m not tempted to muck around. I imagine a simple, offline e-book reader would suit my needs.
I’m not sure why my computer is supposed to be less distracting when it’s across the room than when it’s sitting on my lap. And my computer generally is that ready-to-hand, since I prefer to read at home—reading in public places has too many distractions.
I actually find it easier to get eyestrain from reading off of paper with a lamp than reading off of a screen in an otherwise-dark room. Maybe I just need better lamps.
If I’m going to be reading something of significant length, I prefer to read it off of a screen. I’ve converted print-works I want to read into PDFs before, just so I’m more likely to get through them. (This also lets me use ctrl-F rather than have to hope that the index has what I want it to have.)
TBH, I think this is another case of people who grew up before the Internet explosion failing to appreciate depravity of the young. Cory probably prefers to talk to friends in real life, too, rather than on ICQBookSpaceMessengerJournal. (Dinosaur!)
I’d just point at sites like fanfiction.net, where amateur writers consistently put out fan novels of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of words. Average visit length is *six hours*, spent on only 20 pages—i.e., 5000-word chapters. Alexa says it’s one of the top 200 sites on the Web.
"Having spent a lot of money, and dedicated a lot of space, to my CD collection I was disinclined to dump it in toto and store all my music in digital form. But then I took the plunge (I have an iriver, which I consider immensely superior to the iPod) and now I can’t imagine how I put up with such a wasteful and onerous method of music storage as CDs for so long.”
I thought that observation would lead to a couple of key points that I would’ve expected to be raised by now — and maybe they have (I couldn’t be bothered reading all the comments).
1) fetishisation of the object. I (used to) love the CD-object, and that plays/played a big part in my early resistance to mp3 players and buying music in a purely online-digital form.
But seriously, fetishisation can’t be held as some master-reason any more than distraction. The two states/processes may play a part in different contexts, for different people, in relation to different publications, etc., etc.
2) subjectivity. Surely the questions should be thus: what kind of subject needs to be in place for online reading of books to be a) practicable and b) desirable? What kind of structures (distributions and availability of media technologies, including “old media” technologies such as books; work and leisure routines; humanistic dispositions; commercial transaction systems; etc., etc., etc.) need to be in place for such a subjectivity to become possible in the first place?
Distraction and any of the other general explanations won’t cut it here.
Together with global warming, war, food shortages, a global financial credit crunch, epidemics, and water shortage, we will also be experiencing peak oil. This implies that technology that requires a lot of fossil fuel for mining, manufacturing, distribution, and use may soon disappear, including PCs, handheld devices, the Internet, and e-books.
I have several e-book devices and I do a lot of reading on them. There are literally tens of thousands of free classics available from Gutenberg and various sites that format them better, and only for that and it’s worth. Someone pointed out recently that until now if you wanted to read Arabian Nights the way it was written, it was not so easy since the only unabridged translation done by Sir Richard Burton is very hard to find uncut being privately published only. Now you can read it for free being available at Gutenberg and many other places. Or all Balzac, or....
Then there are books released by authors, sites that sell drm-free books at reasonable prices, Lit files can be broken, and so on.
It’s true that you have to do some conversion and maybe touch-up, but nothing different than converting a cd to digital once you get the appropriate software for your device, usually available for free.
A great place for e-books info, software and such is mobileread.com; Fictionwise which is one the biggest e-book retailers in the world adopted software developed by a member of that site to convert their 16k drm-free ebooks (multi-format) to the Sony format too.
For devices, it’s trickier, depends what’s important for you - portability, eink, backlight, price, but there are already quite a few choices with more coming.
For me it’s a combination of previously mentioned factors, but I think the distraction issue is complex.
I think at least in my case it’s perfectly safe to describe being at a computer as being in a distracting environment. Much of the nonfiction I read is rather dense and requires that I stop reading to process what I’ve read every few minutes. I’ve noticed this is nearly impossible to get through in a distracting environment, computer or not. With fiction, however, it’s often easy to become engrossed and to filter out distractions of any sort. So the distraction argument holds depending on the type of reading required by the book.
So why don’t I read fiction on the computer? Comfort. I read most in bed or lounging in a chair, neither of which is comfortable with my laptop for very long.
I could solve this by buying some kind of reading machine, but I’m cheap and I work at an academic library and I don’t see the point. Make such devices much less expensive, and make e-books as easy to get a hold of as paper books, and maybe I’ll change. I don’t see this happening in a legal way any time soon.
:)
One of the biggest advantages the book had over the scroll is that they allowed readers flip back and forth quickly, to thumb through them, etc.