BTT: Electronic vs. Paper

[fourzoas]

Today's Booking Through Thursday exhorts us to stray from the usual path (posting on your blog, then linking the post to the BTT blog through comments) and to actually conduct a discussion on the BTT blog itself.



First, the prompt:

Something a little different today–

First. Go read this great article from Time Magazine: Books Gone Wild: The Digital Age Reshapes Literature. (Well worth reading.)

Second. Stop and think about it for moment. Computers and digital media are changing everything we do these days, whether we realize it or not, and that includes our beloved books.

Third. DISCUSS!

To be different, today, I’d love to see a discussion here, in the comments, rather than scattered amongst all our separate blogs. Because this is an issue that affects ALL of us, and I’d really like to see us hash out the merits and demerits of this evolution.

Tell us what you think. Do you have an ebook reader? Do you read ebooks on your computer? Do you hate the very thought? How do you feel about the fact that book publishing is changing and facing much the same existential dilemma as the music industry upon the creation of MP3s?

Sure, feel free to write about this on your blog, but honestly–I’d love to see an in-depth discussion, and you can’t do that by flitting about the internet reading 100 different, individual essays. You can only get that by having the back and forth of conversation.

So, today, USE THE COMMENTS!

Once you've read the article (which I highly recommend, as it's a fairly comprehensive--but not very deep--look at the changes already happening and possible in this new hyper-media environment), consider the request to conduct the conversation in the comments on the BTT blog. Yes, it makes things infinitely more convenient in the sense that one doesn't have to click to various standalone websites. Yes, it takes advantage of the affordances of the entire notion of comments in the first place. But--and this is why I left my old blog to return to the sacred halls of LJ--it also quickly reveals the flaws of the blog-as-medium for conversation, since the blog as it exists online doesn't easily facilitate an actual conversation; rather, individual responses to an initial post stack up one behind the other, their connections only dimly discernible through the use of quotes or references to screennames.

I'll respond to the prompt here and link to the blog as I usually do. I like threaded comments; they make me think I'm having a real conversation, as opposed to speaking to the void. I never thought I'd find presentation so important.

Back to the prompt:

The article is, as I noted above, a good read, and I was especially pleased to see a good deal of not-patronizing attention being paid to fan fiction as a legitimate part of this move toward participatory media culture. The internet/web/increasing access to technology tools has made it easier for us to find and to generate the kinds of material we want to read, and I can't help but see that as a largely good thing.

The question about e-books/readers in the prompt doesn't really signify much to me at all, unless someone wants to send me a Sony or Amazon product to review/love/cherish/make much of. I read online, I read offline, I read on my iPhone--words distinguishable against some background are pretty much all I require, and if we get a bit looser with the idea of "reading," I don't even need that, since if I'm doing something that demands my visual attention (like driving or doing housework), I'm listening to a book. Words flow in constantly, and the increased availability of things I want to and am interested in reading has lead to me being more and more interested in writing. I have to like that, don't I?

What's really exciting to me is the idea that things are going to radically change, that the old publishing models will give way (for a gorgeous chaotic while, at least) to something new and wild and open, a place where word of mouth will get someone a readership who may have never sold a book to a publisher before. I'm curious to see what new forms will catch on as time passes (oh to be about 20 years younger now), and I wonder what aesthetic criteria will emerge as we begin finding ways to sift through and sort the vast quantities of text created by people on their personal devices. Very exciting times.

So, your thoughts?

ETA: While browsing the responses on the BTT blog post, I started to find myself really annoyed with the whole "reading is a personal/physical/intimate experience" line of thinking surrounding the paper vs. electronic text, which surprises me (my annoyance, not the argument). I've made similar arguments myself in the past, but for some reason, today the idea is making my skin crawl; now I have image of readers fetishizing and sexualizing the paper book. I'll have to give that response some thought.

ETA 2: A couple of other related articles--
People of the Book
Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab

Comments

[fourzoas.livejournal.com]

Books are delightfully durable, which is why they've lasted for so long! When the Kindle was being introduced, one of the memes that kept circulating around it was that it "disappeared" when you'd got used to it, which was a way of noting that the form of the thing seemed to melt into the background the way books generally do for us as we read.

I think reading ebooks is difficult in part because they're presented to us in a way that's not native to the digital realm. I think about how many pages of text I've read in fan fiction, and am amazed to think that I've been able to consume so much text with such ease in part, I believe, because the writing is presented in a way that makes sense for the web. More to think about...I'm giving a paper on reading online in June.

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

I definitely find reading ebooks via Acrobat very aggravating. Don't know if I'd find it easier if I was using an actual ebook reader...

[fourzoas.livejournal.com]

I agree with you about Acrobat--it's precisely the kind of thing I was thinking of with regard to the native qualities of the digital. "eBooks" that are really just Acrobat files are the lowest level of adaptation of the book to the digital format; there's little, if any, attempt there to take advantage of what you can do on the screen that you can't do on the page. I'm not surprised that the idea of ebooks hasn't taken off if that's what experience most people have of them.

The technology for the Sony and Amazon readers is pretty neat; while I haven't had a chance to play with the Amazon Kindle yet, I have seen the Sony reader, and the eink is amazing. There's no backlighting, which is what causes the eyestrain on a screen, and it's meant to be read under the same conditions as paper-text, so you need your reading lamp at night or good lighting. There's no glare on the screen. It's a neat device. But without good annotation, it doesn't quite serve my needs.

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

Oh! The Sony machine sounds interesting...