Is reading a book electronically the same as reading old-fashioned hardcopy?
Two or three weeks ago, I checked out a book from the library, The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. (Highly recommended, btw.) The next day, when we left for our family vacation, I tossed it in the suitcase, intending it to be my vacation read.
But one evening after dinner in our little resort town, some of my family wanted to pop into a local bookstore, and I tagged along. I browsed the shelves and ended up buying another novel, Testimony by Scott Turow. Testimony is, well, a Turow novel: the protagonist is a lawyer, it features some courtroom drama (although less than some previous Turow works), and has a fair sprinkling of sex scenes. For some reason, other people having sex isn't as thrilling now as it was when I was 15. Testimony shows more social awareness than earlier Turow novels. I don't know what contemporary critics think of Turow, but if you were to classify his stuff as high-quality courtroom beach reads, I don't know that I'd object too strenuously.
And in fact, I did read it on a beach on this particular vacation. Given the choice of the Erdrich or the Turow, I picked up the beach read. It was fine - it carried me through to the end, which is not a given for me with fat novels. Meanwhile, The Night Watchman languished in the suitcase until I returned home.
When I finished Testimony and shoehorned it into bookshelves that already are overflowing with books I'll never read again, I began The Night Watchman and quickly realized it's a better book. (Even the sex scenes are better.) But I didn't own it - it was a library checkout. And the library clock was ticking. The book came due when I was halfway through it. At our local library, one can extend a checkout for two more weeks. But that's only if nobody else has put a hold (a reservation) on it, and there were two holds on this one. My wife pointed out to me that the library has discontinued fines (a pandemic decision, I think), so I could have finished the book and then returned it late, penalty-free. But that didn't seem fair to the people who were waiting for it. So I returned it with half the story still to read.
I really wanted to finish the book. So I did what I almost always do when I wish to read a book, at least when I haven't wandered into a resort town bookstore with the family: I purchased and downloaded an electronic version for my e-reader. (I own an ancient Barnes and Noble Nook. There isn't a Barnes and Noble store within 10 miles of my home anymore - they've all closed. But I'll keep using the Nook until it dies.)
Consequently, for this particular book, I've had two different experiences: reading the first half the old fashioned way, with a hardcover, pages and a bookmark; and then the second half electronically, turning the page with a swipe of the finger and having to remember to recharge the battery every day or two.
I got the same story electronically as I was getting in hardcopy, but the reading experience is different. As a general rule, I don't think I'm a Luddite, and I'm all for saving trees, but I like the old-fashioned way better. The tactile sensations are part of the book reading experience. Even the smell of the book is part of it. And there is something satisfying about the way its weight settles onto the nightstand when I'm ready to pull up the covers and turn out the light.
Jim, perhaps in the same vein, I prefer my recorded music on some physical object, even if just a CD, than downloaded and digital. Digital download is too ethereal for me. I also prefer physical books but restrict those buys to the books I invest with more gravitas.
ReplyDeleteStanley - I don't even download. I just put on Youtube. I don't care about the videos, I just want the soundtracks. I let them play through my headphones while I'm futzing around on the computer. I'm a little foggy on Youtube's financial model, but I have a vague impression that, by allowing myself to be exposed to their commercials, the artists (at least the ones that are uploaded legally) are getting fair compensation. I hope that's true!
DeleteAlso, our most recent vehicle purchase came with a Sirius XM free trial, which hooked us, so now I'm also paying $19.95/month or some such for an audio feed into my car. It's commercial-free (except for Sirius XM promos). It worked pretty well for this vacation trip, which was a driving vacation.
When it comes to music, I've concluded that other people are better choosers and more in-depth on the various categories (jazz, rock, classical, Broadway, et al) than I am, so I'm seeing the advantages of letting curators choose the music. I get exposed to a broader variety that way, and hear artists I might never otherwise be exposed to.
I use YouTube when I remember something and want to retrieve it. I always loved the theme from the movie "Is Paris Burning?" I've danced the Viennese Waltz to it and I could dance it until I die. On YouTube, I was delighted to find this version sung by the wonderful French chanteuse Mireille Mathieu who I had never heard of.
Deletehttps://youtu.be/ciPZWnbMkzk
I ordered up some CDs of hers immediately.
I prefer physical books because I underline them, some times more than once in different color ink. And also put marks in the margin, etc.
ReplyDeleteI guess there are digital equivalents of all these but I never mastered them. It also seems much easier to flip through a physical book to find my underlines and notes.
My underlines and notes also identify which book I have read very deeply, those that I have not read, and those that kind of never caught on, e.g. no underlines after the introduction.
Betty likes this system very much because she can not only get the authors view point but also my viewpoint. It also helps her to decide what books to read.
I have come around to digital books, especially for escape reading. This is because we travel so much in non-Covid times. I used to go to the monthly library used book sale before trips to buy a few paperbacks for 50 cents each. I could leave them behind after reading. Now I download books onto my iPad. I can get new books when away. My luggage is lighter too. The escape books for airplane use are usually library books. I prefer real books for my serious reading, but have also bought ebooks and am getting better at highlighting and writing notes. But, obviously, I can’t easily share these books with others. But generally they don’t want highlighted books anyway as they prefer to read with am open mind about what gets their attention rather than what drew my attention. I often reread books, especially on spirituality, a few years after first reading them. I find it interesting to see that the passages that I highlighted have become of less interest and other passages “speak” to me now more than they did in previous readings. I can easily trace the evolution of my thinking over time this way. I also use the iPad for night reading. If my husband wants to turn out the light while I’m still reading, he can, be because I can still read my book on the tablet after the lights are out.
ReplyDeleteI'm not averse to buying used books, but I have to admit that a marked-up copy is a big turn-off for me - it's like buying a can of peaches with a big dent in it. (For the record, I haven't actually purchased peaches in a can for many years, although there was a time, when the kids were young, when they were quite popular in our house - cling syrup, yum!)
DeleteI don't mind highlighted books; I usually got secondhand text books in college for a heavily discounted price. I don't know what the kids do now, maybe it's all digital.
DeleteI'm on my third Kindle, though I use it more for surfing the net, email,Pinterest etc. than I do actual reading. I still prefer physical books because I don't read in a linear way. I skip around a lot, and come back and read a part that I like. I've also been known to read the ending first.
Now my brothers and sisters and I are divvying up Dad's book collection. Too bad that a lot of it is going to be given to the public library rummage sale, none of us has room to take very much with us. Kind of goes for the household goods too, my parents' house has 71 years worth of accumulation. And memories. But that's a story for another day.
Lol! I skip around a lot too, especially with fiction that is boring. Very often I also skip to the last few chapters. I have no trouble doing that with ebooks - just slide the bar at the bottom of the page. I do make a note of where I was, or bookmark the page, just in case I change my mind and want to restart reading where I left off. It took me a while to adapt, but now I do all my escape and news reading on the iPad. The news prompted a lot more escape fiction after trump was elected!
DeleteI had to write a lot during my career. For a long time I continued to write first drafts on yellow legal pads. Then type into the computer for the multiple rounds of revisions. At some point I transitioned into drafting on the computer too. I was totally unaware of this transition when it happened. I just realized at some point that I had finally dropped the handwritten draft habit. Same with reading on the tablet. But I buy paper books when I want to keep them for more than one reading. I don’t reread fiction. Almost never anyway.
Katherine, you might want to see if there are any schools- inner city, charter, or private like the Christo Rey schools who could use your dad’s books. Especially if he still has reading list books. Even to schools out of town - you could ship them in boxes.
My wife is a skip-ahead-er, too. Not me; I don't want to know how it ends until I get to the ending. Of course, with a lot of the low-grade detective and police procedural stuff I read, it's not really too hard to figure out how it's going to end.
DeleteAnne - re: writing: the only writing I do is homilies (except for this blog, I guess). I didn't get ordained until the personal-device era, so I've always composed on the computer. I've tried a few times to draft homilies longhand. It's *different*. I can't think and write longhand at the same time.
DeleteI haven't had to do significant longhand writing since my last bluebook test in MBA school back in the '90's. Even then, I was out of practice with writing manually. By the end of the test, my hand would feel like a road grader had run over it.
I can't think and write longhand at the same time.
DeleteThe computer writing and long hand writing processes seem to be different.
I usually have a sketch pad beside me while I am drinking my morning coffee on the front enclosed porch. Most of the time that is just ideas, some times lists, sometimes outlines. That process seems to promote creativity. Sometimes I write sentences and even paragraphs that way. I find that slower processes of hand writing seems to promote more creative writing.
When I write on the computer my mind seems to be processing things in the background as it prepares me to write. It seems to be a more linear process and less creative that the sketch pad process.
Jack, I have always kept a lined notepad handy, writing thoughts or ideas to go back to later. I did this a lot with research, especially after reading numerous sources that emphasized different points of view, or raised questions that needed further research. I generally synthesized numerous sources into long analytical reports. Couldn't have done it without my notebooks. I do the same with religious and spiritual reading, for my own thought process, not to put into a report.
ReplyDeleteJim, I finished grad school in 1976. I started an MBA after college, but dropped out after one semester. I eventually went back to grad school part- time at night at Georgetown, while working full-time, to do international economics. Their grad program courses were almost all at night, during summers too. They catered to working professionals. I changed jobs (from computer programming) after getting my master's to work at the World Bank for the senior economist in my department. Lots and lots of research, analysis and in-depth reports. He was the perfect mentor for my first job in the field. I learned so much more real world international Econ from him than from my coursework. He had chosen me from many applicants based on a couple of grad school papers I had submitted as writing samples, because he saw that I had good analytical and writing skills. Both of these skills were immensely improved through his mentoring, laying the foundation for me to build a successful freelance career. He urged me to finish the PhD, but three sons convinced me that it was not to be. Part-time consulting worked better for me while raising kids. So I drafted in longhand, and our long- suffering dept administrative assistant would type it up. I have terrible handwriting, so she had to check with me frequently. I would do multiple revisions on the typed copies - she left lots of empty space for ne to use on the typed copies. No computers then. My research was done without the internet. It's so much easier now! . I got a primitive computer around 1990, and a horrible word processing program called Wordstar, that crashed regularly - still, a huge improvement. Yet my first drafts were still on yellow legal pads for several more years. Now if I write longhand for too long, my hand cramps up and my arm aches. I wonder what evolution will do to the human hand now that kids don't do much handwriting.
Anne - that just seems really cool, that you worked for the World Bank :-)
DeleteAs it happens, in my own brief teaching career, I taught Wordstar-era word processing, much if it in night classes, to Chicago professionals who were learning the new technology. This was back in the mid-1980s. I never taught Wordstar (never learned the shortcut keys), but taught MultiMate, WordPerfect and other now-long-defunct technologies. Also Lotus 1-2-3. I was usually the youngest person in the classroom. I didn't have a master's degree at the time, but in those days it was difficult to find instructors with grad degrees who knew the technologies, so they had mere bachelor degree holders like me teach. I loved teaching adults, would go back to it if any community college would have me and if I wasn't still paying college tuition et al for the family.
My handwriting is bad, too. I never learned the correct way to hold a pen / pencil. Still don't know how to do it. The sisters and laywomen at my Catholic school knew I was doing it wrong but couldn't figure out how to get me to do it right. These days, in our suburban public school district, they would pull me out of class and send me to occupational therapy classes to learn the right way to do it.
Around here, they stopped teaching handwriting/penmanship in primary school some 20-25 years ago, under the theory that everything now is done on the keyboard. But my daughter the teacher tells me they're now rethinking that decision, as developmentally, it seems there are some deficits from not teaching kids the old-fashioned way. I think it's something to do with hand-eye-brain coordination.
One time when I was an impecunious college kid my secondhand manual typewriter broke down and I wrote a ten page theme paper with footnotes in longhand. The professor accepted it and gave me a decent grade. Nowadays that probably wouldn't happen.
DeleteJim, the World Bank job was the best job I ever had, and my social security earnings started when I was 13 - so many years and many jobs. I used to tell my husband that I couldn’t believe that I was getting paid to do something so interesting. My wonderful boss/ mentor left the Bank after I was there a year. I was heartbroken, but he had already taught me more than I would have learned if I had finished the PhD curriculum. Anyone who is lucky enough to have a mentor like that when they start their career is blessed.
DeleteKatherine - 10 pages in LONGHAND! That professor sounds almost as great as my first World Bank boss. He turned up again in DC a few years later - as a college professor and consultant. He was Korean, and had returned to Korea for a few years. But his wife and kids wanted to come back to DC.
DeleteAs an undergrad, I worked for the econ department for $50/semester to grade freshman quizzes from the 201 and 202 classes (Intro to Micro/Macro). I got pretty good at reading bad handwriting.
ReplyDeleteAll the econ professors were really nice. I think it's one of the main reasons I decided to be an econ major. I'm glad we're having this conversation - the memories are making me happy :-)
Simple answer: not only NO but HELL NO.
ReplyDelete