Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Before anyone asks:  I still like the Kindle.  There are too many possibilities for cost savings and new combinations of resources and pedagogical practices for me to get rid of it.

But the act of reading an ebook is a less satisfying experience than reading a printed book.  I have to admit that it is quite possible that personal preferences developed over 40 years of reading from paper have the largest role to play in my perceptions.  And these preferences may be entirely generational. Children beginning to read today may not have as much experience reading from paper as they do reading from electrons by the time they get through high school.  In which case my complaints (and yours too?) may be completely subsumed by the march of technology.

Remember when CDs finally and fully replaced LPs?  We lost 12"x12" artwork and albums that had a flow that lasted the length of a side and then reestablished that flow in the second side.  Now that MP3s and other download-ready media are replacing CDs, we're losing albums as cohesive units.  [The Decemberists current release, The Hazards of Love, notwithstanding.]

The difference between a book and an ebook on an ereader is obvious but worth noting.  Books have individual covers, come in a variety of sizes and backings.  The weight of the paper in a book varies by edition and backing.  In a hardbound edition, a book may have a center section full of glossy photographs or other non-text visual complements.  Books have title pages, Library of Congress data, publisher's information (edition, year of publication, etc), "about the author" sections, synopses on the folds of the dust jacket or the back cover.  A book has a physical presence, a weight in your hands.  This physical presence allows you to know a book's text length and dimensions.  You can see whether the book has a center section of glossy pages without reading up to that point in the text; you can skip ahead to endnotes or back to reread a section.  And as you skip you know physically how far forward or back you are going.

Ebooks are, like MP3s, simply an arrangement of binary code being decoded into a format you can read.  They lack individual covers, and on the Kindle they mostly lack any metadata (publisher’s markings, Library of Congress classifications, author information, etc.) much beyond a perfunctory title page.  As though the book exists (or existed) free from any consideration for the people and decisions that turned the author’s manuscript into a book. 

To be sure this is something that ebook publishers can and should fix.  Library of Congress data and brief author biographies are not temporal data, and they can be added as linked sections that do not interfere with the flow of the pages.  Publication data, in the case of historically significant books, should be included as well.   A young reader should know where, when, and by whom Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first published.  Such data should also include the edition from which the electronic version was copied.

I also miss the cover.  Someone at the original paper publishing house had the artwork for the cover commissioned and used it to illustrate the content of the book.  This is another way of understanding the book, and it is missing. 

So deficiencies in metadata can be easily addressed.  But ereaders assert their own physicality onto an ebook.  And this is something that cannot be fixed.  (I guess curmudgeons like me will just have to get used to it.)  In reading P.G. Wodehouse’s Not George Washington or Thomas Wertenbacker’s Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676 I found myself wondering how far into the book I had read.  This wonderment persisted despite the fact that the Kindle tells you at the bottom of the screen in clear language: for example in an electronic copy of Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide 1913 Kindle states, “22%, Locations 365-70 of 1606.”  My only explanation for my dissatisfaction with that method of measuring the progress of my reading is that I am missing the physical understanding I usually receive when reading a book.

Finally, I find myself slightly distracted by the act of moving from page to page: clicking a button.  I’m just not getting used to it in a way I had hoped I would.  Maybe somewhere in the back of my mind I am aware that the next and previous pages don’t actually exist and must be decoded in order to be shown. 

All in all, using an ereader seems a shallow experience when directly compared to reading a book.  Part of the shallowness can be improved by Amazon or other publishers of electronic books, part cannot be improved.  Still, I wouldn’t be reading Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason if it weren’t for the Kindle.  So while I will lament the loss of a more complete reading experience, I will applaud the broader availability of books that might otherwise languish in their out-of-print status.

 

Daniel

 

Flag as inappropriate

No comments have been left for this entry.

Leave a comment
This K12HSN blog does not allow anonymous comments.

• To leave a comment, please log in to K12HSN Blogs.
• Don't have a K12HSN account? Sign up here.