Author Andrew Piper: Turning Pages Is Important, Therefore Reading Ebooks Isn't Reading

from the you-can't-hug-an-ebook-with-digital-arms-or-some-shit-like-that dept

Every technological advance is greeted as some point during its life cycle (usually as it approaches ubiquity) by the disgruntled arguments of people who prefer older things or methods. Never has this been more prevalent than in the digital era. People diss mp3s for their sonic limitations, which is fine, but then they go a step further, claiming the "real" way to listen to music involves using other, older technology. There's an emphasis on the physicality of the product, as if it were somehow more "real" simply because you can leave greasy fingerprints on it, thus lowering its resale value.

Certain authors have argued this adamantly over the recent years, proudly declaiming the superiority of the old school, dead tree book. Apparently, there's nothing like picking up an odorous book (smells like real) whose binding glue has slowly disintegrated over the years, causing the pages to scatter across the floor and sending all those helpful book scorpions scuttling off in search of a new home. That's real. That's reading. This stuff you do with your eyes on screens? Your brain might tell you it's reading, but it's nothing of the sort.

Fortunately for those of us who believe otherwise, Andrew Piper has visited Slate to set us all back on the path of touchable righteousness. In a lengthy post that reads like a dry historical text populated with anti-tech non sequiturs, Piper decries the falseness of reading books on a screen, because if you can't physically touch it, it's just not real.

Amid the seemingly endless debates today about the future of reading, there remains one salient, yet often overlooked fact: Reading isn’t only a matter of our brains; it’s something that we do with our bodies.

For those of you without skulls to hold your eyes (lucky bastards!), reading is an experience for the body as much as it is for the brain. There's your hands, which will turn pages and... your torso... which holds your limbs and, by extension, your hands... never mind. Here's more:

To think about the future of reading means, then, to think about the long history of how touch has shaped reading and, by extension, our sense of ourselves while we read.

At this point, the history lesson begins. The first witness on the stand in defense of "touching is reading" is none other than St. Augustine, whose conversion to Christianity was a defining moment in "hand-to-book" reading.

The original Kindle Fire

At this moment, he tells us, “I had no wish to read more and no need to do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.” Augustine closes the book, marking his place with his finger, and goes to tell his friend Alypius about his experience. His conversion is complete.

Bookmarking. Completely unavailable or at the very least, not the same! Score one for St. Augustine. There's much, much, much, much more history where that came from, weaving together a very long narrative that basically states "humans have hands and like to touch stuff." Along the way, you'll meet all sorts of historical figures (Eugene Delacroix! Faust! Abraham Ortelius!) It's an essay of appropriately essay-esque length.

In between the historical musings are convoluted paragraphs like this:

Nothing is more suspect today than the book’s continued identity of being “at hand.” The spines, gatherings, threads, boards, and folds that once gave a book its shapeliness, that fit it to our hands, are being supplanted by the increasingly fine strata of new reading devices, integrated into vast woven systems of connection. If books are essentially vertebral, contributing to our sense of human uniqueness that depends upon bodily uprightness, digital texts are more like invertebrates, subject to the laws of horizontal gene transfer and nonlocal regeneration. Like jellyfish or hydra polyps, they always elude our grasp in some fundamental sense. What this means for how we read—and how we are taken hold of by what we read—is still far from clear.

If I'm reading this correctly (though I suppose I am not, since I'm reading it on an LCD screen), the rise of ebooks will finally allow us to shed our uncomfortable skeletons and return, spineless and triumphant, to R'lyeh to awaken Cthulhu from his long slumber.

And there's this, which one would think was Piper attempting to wrap things up, but actually lies somewhere near the middle of the post:

For Augustine, the book’s closedness—that it could be grasped as a totality—was integral to its success in generating transformative reading experiences. Its closedness was the condition of the reader’s conversion. Digital texts, by contrast, are radically open in their networked form. They are marked by a very weak sense of closure. Indeed, it is often hard to know what to call them (e-books, books, texts, or just documents) without any clear sense of the material differences between them.

Most people call them ebooks.

Piper's article seems to go beyond the normal arguments about aesthetic preferences and move towards touting the moral superiority of print, simply because your hands can touch and feel paper and it's different than touching and feeling an electronic device. E-readers are not... physical enough. And because of that lack of physicality, reading is no longer as real.

But think of all the advances made over the years that just aren't as real as their predecessors, thanks to diminished physical interaction. We fully expect Piper to explore these in further densely unreadable screeds:

• Riding a bike today isn't nearly as real as it was, what with not having to worry about your crotchal region and forearms being pounded mercilessly by the combination of solid rubber tires, no suspension system and a lack of decent pavement.
  
• Driving a car lacks the coarse physicality of driving a team of horses across dusty plains in search of a Slurpee and a pack of smokes.
• Watching a movie isn't nearly as "real" as watching a good old fashioned play, where actors were actual, physical human beings close enough to touch and/or interrupt with an ill-timed coughing fit/incoming call.
• For that matter, making an outgoing call is simply a matter of pressing some fake buttons (or simply mashing a thumb on a fake face in the Contact list). Our forearms and dialing finger have atrophied from under-use going all the way back to the days when friends with the most 0's in their numbers got the fewest calls.
• Today's cold scientific medical community, with its beeping machinery and wires everywhere can never be as real as it was in the past when the common cold was treated with a combination of leeches, heroin and a full frontal lobotomy.
  
• Firing up your local newspaper's website will never be as real as paging through the paper version, admiring the ink stains on your fingers and the box scores informing you that the game ended after press time. The website also can't offer you the physical pain of multiple scratches (picked up while retrieving the paper from your overgrown rose bush) or multiple bite wounds (picked up while retrieving the paper from your neighbor's Rottweiler-infested backyard).
• Nuking a quick meal for the kids? Get over yourself. Real people start their own fires from scratch, by doing whatever it is that Boy Scouts do to earn the "Firestarter" badge. And that Healthy Choice meal? Better get right to slaughtering your own flavorless chicken and growing some equally flavorless rice to accompany it.
• Writing an email can't possibly compare to the physical purity of placing quill to parchment and hand-scratching a lengthy URL onto it, along with "Yo, Ted. Check thiſ out."
• Buying stuff with a credit card online vs. biting gold pieces into "bits" at the trading post, online classes vs. sleeping through Philosophy in an uncomfortable chair, and etc. ad nauseaum.

One of Piper's closing paragraphs comes so close to getting it right, but he twists it to fit his "ebooks are intangible" narrative. He describes the "connection" the physical book makes when he reads a story to his kids at bedtime:

As I begin to read, the kids begin to lean into me. Our bodies assume positions of rest, the book our shared column of support. No matter what advertisers say, this could never be true of the acrobatic screen. As we gradually sink into the floor, and each other, our minds are freed to follow their own pathways, unlike the prescribed pathways of the Web. We read and we drift. “The words of my book nothing,” writes Walt Whitman, “the drift of it everything.”

While I'm not sure what version of the web Piper uses (Web 0.85b?) that follows "prescribed pathways" (mine goes pretty much anywhere with very little provocation), that's not really where the error lies. The book isn't the "shared column of support," Piper. It's you! Why would you sell your own importance short? My kids like to be near me, too. It doesn't matter if we're reading a book, streaming something on Netflix, watching someone do something funny/stupid on YouTube or slinging Angry Birds across the screen. The important thing isn't the physicality of the object. It's the shared experience. To attribute this to something made of glue, paper and ink is ridiculous, and to further claim that a shift to electronics is robbing us of a part of our humanity even more so.

Filed Under: andrew piper, books, ebooks, paper, reading

German Chancellor Says Only Print Media Can Teach You 'Real' Reading

from the smelly-logic dept

Angela Merkel may be Germany's Chancellor, and therefore a busy woman, but since she trained as a chemist, you might expect her to have a more positive view about new technology than this statement from a recent interview (original video in German), reported by the Netzpolitik blog, would suggest:

I regard the print media as very important. Being able to read is quite another thing from being on the Internet -- something that naturally will grow, and increase in importance. Nonetheless, the ability to read is something very, very important. And therefore I hope that, alongside the strong development of all the new media, all the well-known newspapers, the print media, the magazines, have a good future.

What's strange here is that the vast majority of those newspapers and magazines publish all or most of their articles online as well as in printed versions. The words are identical, so what magic ingredient does Frau Merkel think is missing online? It can't be the readability, since digital versions are arguably more legible, thanks to the ability to change the print size for those whose eyesight is not what it was.

The only real difference is that online versions are insubstantial, simply an image on a screen, while printed versions consist of ink on paper. Maybe her comment does, in fact, reflect her past as a chemist, and what she secretly misses is that characteristic odor of printing inks. Perhaps she just needs a iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer device or equivalent.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: angela merkel, digital, germany, reading

Debunking The Myth That The Internet Generation Doesn't Buy Or Read Books

from the whoda-thunk-it? dept

If you just listened to the popular press pushing stereotypes, you might think that kids these days can't think in complete sentences, let alone read anything longer than 140 characters (oops, this post is too long!). And, of course, there are a few luddites out there who keep insisting that the internet means that the kids today don't read long form works any more. Of course, we've been pointing out for years that this is a complete fabrication. Back in 2007, we wrote about how kids were reading more books than ever before. Two years later, we noted that there was a notable increase in reading long-form fiction books. Certainly, we've seen a massive increase in the number of books being published (even discounting "non-traditional" or self-published books, in the last decade there's been an increase in books published per year of almost 50% from about 200,000 to 300,000).

And, now there's even more evidence that the supposed death of reading by kids is a complete myth. Aaron DeOliveira alerts us to this story that shows that so-called "millennials" spend more money on books than any other demographic group. In fact, that group -- those born between 1979 and 1989 -- now buy 30% of all books sold. As the report notes, this even beats out baby boomers, despite the fact that the boomers have a lot more disposable income.

Either way, can we dispense with the twin myths that (a) the internet generation doesn't pay for content and (b) that they don't read long form books?

Filed Under: baby boomers, book, internet generation, longform reading, millenials, reading, teens, young people

Is The Internet Making People Dumber... Or Is Nick Carr Reminiscing For Days That Never Existed

from the go-read-a-book dept

Well, you had to know this was coming. With the release of Nick Carr's latest book, The Shallows -- basically an extended riff on his silly and easily debunked article from The Atlantic a few years ago -- Carr is now getting plenty of press coverage for his claims. However, like Jaron Lanier before him, this seems like yet another case of Carr pining for the good old days that never existed. As I've pointed out in the past, I think Carr is a brilliant writer, and a deep thinker, who is quite good at pulling interesting nuggets out of a diverse set of information. What I find absolutely infuriating about him, however, is that he lays down this cobblestone path of brilliance, making good point backed up by evidence, followed by good point backed up by evidence... and then at the end, after you're all sucked in, he makes a logical leap for which there is no actual support. He seems to do this over and over again, and his latest effort appears to be the same thing yet again.

The Wall Street Journal is running a bit of a "debate" between Carr and Clay Shirky, who each have books out, which seem to suggest the exact opposite things. So the two of them each address the question of whether or not the internet is making us dumb. Carr's column does a nice job highlighting a variety of studies that show that too much multitasking means you don't concentrate very much on anything. Except... that seems a bit tautological, doesn't it? The "key study" that he highlighted shows that "heavy multitaskers" did poorly on certain cognitive tests. But it fails to say which direction the causal relationship goes in. It could be that those who don't do well in certain cognitive areas are more likely to spend their time multitasking, for example, since they get less enjoyment from bearing down on a single piece of information.

And, unfortunately, there's lots of evidence to suggest that Carr is very clearly misreading the evidence he presents in his book. Jonah Lehrer at the NY Times, in his review of Carr's book, highlights this point:

What Carr neglects to mention, however, is that the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet and related technologies are actually good for the mind. For instance, a comprehensive 2009 review of studies published on the cognitive effects of video games found that gaming led to significant improvements in performance on various cognitive tasks, from visual perception to sustained attention. This surprising result led the scientists to propose that even simple computer games like Tetris can lead to "marked increases in the speed of information processing." One particularly influential study, published in Nature in 2003, demonstrated that after just 10 days of playing Medal of Honor, a violent first-person shooter game, subjects showed dramatic increases in ­visual attention and memory.

Carr's argument also breaks down when it comes to idle Web surfing. A 2009 study by neuroscientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that performing Google searches led to increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, at least when compared with reading a "book-like text." Interestingly, this brain area underlies the precise talents, like selective attention and deliberate analysis, that Carr says have vanished in the age of the Internet. Google, in other words, isn't making us stupid -- it's exercising the very mental muscles that make us smarter.

So the science doesn't actually agree with what Carr says it does. Then all that he's left with is the claim that, because of the internet, fewer people are reading books... and that's somehow "bad." This isn't based on any evidence, mind you. It's just based on Carr saying it's bad:

It is revealing, and distressing, to compare the cognitive effects of the Internet with those of an earlier information technology, the printed book. Whereas the Internet scatters our attention, the book focuses it. Unlike the screen, the page promotes contemplativeness.

Reading a long sequence of pages helps us develop a rare kind of mental discipline. The innate bias of the human brain, after all, is to be distracted. Our predisposition is to be aware of as much of what's going on around us as possible. Our fast-paced, reflexive shifts in focus were once crucial to our survival. They reduced the odds that a predator would take us by surprise or that we'd overlook a nearby source of food.

To read a book is to practice an unnatural process of thought. It requires us to place ourselves at what T. S. Eliot, in his poem "Four Quartets," called "the still point of the turning world." We have to forge or strengthen the neural links needed to counter our instinctive distractedness, thereby gaining greater control over our attention and our mind.

It is this control, this mental discipline, that we are at risk of losing as we spend ever more time scanning and skimming online.

This makes two important assumptions. First, that reading a book is somehow the absolute pinnacle of information consumption. There is no evidence that this is the case. In fact, in Shirky's response piece, he notes similar misguided concerns about how mass-market books would make us dumber:

In the history of print, we got erotic novels 100 years before we got scientific journals, and complaints about distraction have been rampant; no less a beneficiary of the printing press than Martin Luther complained, "The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure of limit to this fever for writing." Edgar Allan Poe, writing during another surge in publishing, concluded, "The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information."

But, as Shirky points out, society adapts. Each new technology brings along some good uses and some bad, but society, as a whole, seems to adapt to promote the good uses, such that they greatly outweigh the bad uses.

The second assumption that Carr falsely makes, of course, is that our internet time is taking away from our reading time. But, as Shirky notes in his piece and his book, it seems like our internet time is more about taking away from TV time (remember TV?), and thus is allowing us to be more interactive and do more socially useful things with our time than just vegging out:

First, the rosy past of the pessimists was not, on closer examination, so rosy. The decade the pessimists want to return us to is the 1980s, the last period before society had any significant digital freedoms. Despite frequent genuflection to European novels, we actually spent a lot more time watching "Diff'rent Strokes" than reading Proust, prior to the Internet's spread. The Net, in fact, restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture.

The present is, as noted, characterized by lots of throwaway cultural artifacts, but the nice thing about throwaway material is that it gets thrown away. This issue isn't whether there's lots of dumb stuff online--there is, just as there is lots of dumb stuff in bookstores. The issue is whether there are any ideas so good today that they will survive into the future. Several early uses of our cognitive surplus, like open source software, look like they will pass that test.

The past was not as golden, nor is the present as tawdry, as the pessimists suggest, but the only thing really worth arguing about is the future. It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity. We are now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow and fitful development of cultural alternatives. Just as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies.

Oh, and as was noted well over a year ago, after decades upon decades of people reading fewer books (mainly because of TV), recently, it turns out that people are actually reading more books -- entirely contrary to Carr's entire thesis.

Filed Under: clay shirky, internet, multi-tasking, nick carr, reading, smart

Be Careful Challenging Others To Read 100 Books, As You Might Infringe On Someone's Trademark

from the do-morons-in-a-hurry-read-books? dept

Jacob writes "It appears that American Reading has several trademarks on the term "100 Book Challenge," and as such, has sent a cease & desist letter to the owner of the website LibraryThing.com (a social cataloguing site that also provides content and services to libraries) for having a user-created discussion group called "100 Books Challenge 2010" (and also for previous years).

I looked up the trademarks they listed in their C&D letter and they all seem to apply to educational programs designed to promote children (pre-k to 12th grade) to read through incentives and stuff. Members of the 100 Books Challenge groups on LibraryThing, however, only commit to reading at least 100 books in one year, with no set curriculum, reading levels, or prizes, and all members of LibraryThing are, by law, over the age of 13, due to the COPA, and as such, are not "children."

I do not know if they've sent a similar letter to other sites that have a "100 Book(s) Challenge," such as another social cataloguing website called GoodReads.."

There are certainly questions about whether or not there's any likelihood of confusion here. I have a lot of trouble seeing how any such confusion would result. It also seems like the term is being used in a descriptive way (it is in fact, a 100 books challenge), which you would think would help qualify as fair use. But, of course, just going through the process of fighting such a claim is expensive and probably not worth it for a site like LibraryThing.

Filed Under: 100 books, challenges, reading, trademarks

Oh No! Nobody Reads! Oh No! It's Too Cheap For Everyone To Read!

from the accessibility-is-a-good-thing dept

We recently wrote about how booksellers were freaking out over the "price war" between Amazon and Wal-Mart, whereby they're starting to offer certain books at a very cheap price to bring in more customers. The whole thing was a bit silly. Reader Robin Trehaeven alerts us to a fantastic opinion piece in the Library Journal by Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, in which she does a superb job mocking what she refers to as the "accessibility paradox" where those who are used to being gatekeepers to information at the same time as they're supposedly promoting the benefits of greater information, suddenly start whining when information really does get more accessible. This includes those booksellers:

I'm also taken aback by the horrified response of the book industry. I thought the big crisis was that nobody reads. Now it turns out the problem is that books are so popular with the masses they're being used as bait to draw in shoppers.

Come on, guys, get your story straight! Which is it?

But most of her brilliant sarcasm is directed at those in her own profession, who both work hard to get information for free, at the same time they complain about how the internet has made it so easy to route around librarians:

It strikes me that this issue is somewhat parallel to the love-hate relationship that many academic librarians have had with the Internet. Although our complicated relationship is improving, there are still some silly assumptions floating around. Oh no, our reference stats are down! Hurrah! People are able to find answers without our help. That's awesome! Anybody can publish on the web, unlike scholarly journals which are peer-reviewed. Fine, but don't tell me all peer-reviewed journal articles are shining examples of reason and academic brilliance. A lot of them are finely-sliced research rehashing the same findings, or are closely examined and exquisitely detailed trivia. Besides, there are plenty of examples of peer review failing in spectacular ways--and examples of wonderful peer-reviewed journals that were born free online.

But this is my favorite: Unlike information you find on the web, we pay for the information in our databases, and you get what you pay for. No, actually, with what you pay for you get a lot of junk that you don't even want, but you have no choice.

You want this journal? You have to subscribe to this pricey bundle. Either that, or you purchase one article at a time for your users, something more and more libraries are doing. You spend less, but the information never visits the library--it goes straight from the publisher to the desk of one user. All the library gets is the bill. Apart from failing on its merits, the argument that paid is better than free is self-contradicting. We can't tell students that purchased information is by definition better than free and, at the same time, beg faculty to recognize how broken the current system is and please, please, please make their work open access.

It's a great overall column, and nice to see a librarian lay the smackdown on hypocrisy within the bookselling and librarian worlds.

Filed Under: barbara fister, books, information, libraries, open access, prices, reading

Wait, Wasn't Google Supposed To Have Destroyed Our Interest In Reading Books?

from the oops dept

For years, we've found it amusing when various technophobes or techno-pessimists would bemoan the fact that kids spent so much time online as compared to doing "real" things like reading books. This seemed odd to us, as there was a long period of time where the alternative was kids watching TV. It seems like having kids actively engaged in communicating with others through text is a great way to improve both reading and writing skills -- and there's been plenty of evidence to suggest that, in fact, kids writing skills are getting much better. And, now, the latest report finds that (despite Nick Carr's claim that the Google-era is killing our desire to read long form articles and books) more people are reading such things than just a few years ago.

Basically, the decades long trend of people (of all age groups and backgrounds) reading less seems to have been reversed. However, as Valleywag notes, the head of the National Endowment for the Arts refuses to accept the idea that the internet played a major role in the upsurge in reading. There certainly could be other factors -- and it wouldn't be at all surprising to find out a variety of different reasons for the higher reading rates, but it seems odd to out and out say the internet was a lot less important than other factors.

Filed Under: internet, kids, reading

Does The Internet Generation Make For Bad Jurors?

from the moving-ahead-with-times dept

The Lord Chief Justice in the UK has suggested that the internet generation aren't very good on juries because they're more used to reading information on a screen, rather than listening. That's a bit misleading. Just because people are used to reading lots of information or consuming it off of a screen, it doesn't preclude their ability to listen live. However, the suggestions to potentially upgrade the tools for jurors, such as by providing them screens with info, does make some sense. It could make it much easier to present a lot of information to a jury in a more manageable fashion, rather than requiring them to just listen. But, even so, it does seem a bit extreme to suggest that younger jurors are simply unable to listen in the jury box and follow the details of a trial.

Filed Under: internet, juries, listening, reading, uk

Companies Don't Even Read Their Own EULAs Carefully

from the so-why-should-we? dept

A couple of funny stories that came out this week illustrate the extent of the problem with the End-User Licensing Agreements that we're constantly being asked to "agree" to every time we use a new piece of software. First, an Italian site noticed that the EULA for Apple's newly-released version of Safari for Windows requires that "The software allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time." Obviously, most Windows users do not have an "Apple-labeled computer," which would suggest that they'd be violating Apple's license (and therefore infringing copyright) if they installed Safari at all. That would be ridiculous, and sure enough, a quick call to Apple confirmed that this was an oversight on Apple's part, and that you can, in fact, install Safari on a non-Apple Windows machine. The same day the Apple story was making the rounds, Chris Soghoian noticed that if read literally, Google's terms of service would prohibit anyone under 18 from using any of Google's websites. It reads "You may not use the Services... if you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google." As Chris points out, in most states you have to be 18 to form a binding contract, suggesting that those under 18 are prohibited from using the service. He notes that a lot of other companies, including Facebook, MySpace, and Microsoft, have friendlier terms, either limiting the services to those 13 and over or saying nothing about age at all.

This is another good reason that we should be skeptical about the idea that these kinds of perfunctory EULAs and TOSs should be treated exactly the same way as ordinary contracts signed by two human beings. When it's in their interests, companies try to argue that these kinds of contracts should be strictly enforced, for example claiming that it trumps the first sale doctrine. Yet it's been clear for a long time that users almost never read these agreements. Now it seems that even the lawyers nominally in charge of writing them don't review them very carefully. If neither party to these "contracts" takes them seriously, might that suggest that the courts should be skeptical of considering them to be contracts at all?

Filed Under: eulas, reading
Companies: apple, google