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As amusing as sentences like "What be this strange futurebox?" and "All of my colleagues have [e-readers] and most of my friends - people I previously thought of as human beings with hearts, souls and inner lives" are, I must vehemently disagree with Lucy Mangan's recent Stylist column decrying the use of e-readers.
For a start, I think it is rather obvious that Ms. Mangan does not have to make the 2-4 hour daily commute to/from her job that many Londoners must. If she did, she would be as immensely grateful as I am that I have not had to carry dead-tree editions of The Life of Samuel Johnson and Le Morte d'Arthur around with me on my journey. Excuse me, I have to go on a tangent now. Speaking of the latter, I feel like people, particularly my high school English teachers, have been keeping things from me. Why oh why did no one ever tell me that it is, in fact, hilarious? I realise this will have been obvious to people who majored in literature and humanities and the like, but for this scientist, discovering that Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail is actually not a parody but a faithful re-enactment of the stories contained in L M d'A was a revelation. If you were an Arthurian knight whose history was being retold centuries later, you really were in danger of encountering dwarves who would leap out from behind trees and whack your horse on the head. The dwarf would then force you to fight two other knights and when you defeated them, would suddenly and inexplicably experience a change of allegiance, reveal that he knew exactly where you were going and would help you on your quest. Castles populated entirely by women were a terrible peril for all good knights. Every sexual encounter seemed to beget new knights determined to kill their fathers. Also, every joust ended in a bonfire's worth of shattered shields and lances. It's a wonder there were any trees left in the forests in Arthurian England. And do not get me started on Merlin, who reveals everyone's fate in the first ninety pages, including his own, thereby completely spoiling the rest of the book. Within four pages, he manages to fall in love and gets himself sealed up in a tree by a witch, removing him from the remainder of the story just as the reader has decided his character is the most interesting one in it. This was a clever literary device in the fifteenth century? What? I mean, it's amusing, but no wonder modern storytellers are so obsessed with giving Merlin something other than a deus-ex-machina persona.
Anyway, my point is that without this wonderful Kindle invention, I would never have read a good many of the classics of English literature that have been the bulk of my intake over the past two years, mostly because (a) it would never have occurred to me to seek them out without the assistance of Project Gutenberg and (b) I would never have voluntarily carried such massive tomes around in my handbag.
Much as I love my dead-tree Folio (and paperback and hardcover) editions of my favourite books, they're not without flaws. In a country in which you pay a premium for space, owning paper copies of all your books is a luxury that many people can't afford, whether they're a single person crammed into a tiny studio apartment or a spouse in a two-bed flat with a partner and a couple of kids. If my eyes are tired, I can't resize the text to a larger font so that I can still read, or if I have a headache from looking at screens all day, I can't activate the Text-to-Speech function that will read to me. (Granted, the Kindle does this in the creepy voice of our future robot overlords, but it is an option.) Both of the aforementioned also demonstrate the increased accessibility to books that e-readers afford people with vision problems.
I admit that loaning and gifting electronic books isn't quite as fun as doing the same with paper editions - you can only unwrap an e-reader once - but owning one hasn't stopped me from giving and receiving paper copies of books with pleasure.
So while I'm happy to stay old-school at home because I happen to be one of the people who can indulge in the luxury of space for my dead-tree editions, I can't agree that e-books are "eroding our humanity". They've made it possible for me to spend more, not less, time reading and increased the scope of my choice of material. I think this means they're enforcing - possibly even improving - my humanity.
For a start, I think it is rather obvious that Ms. Mangan does not have to make the 2-4 hour daily commute to/from her job that many Londoners must. If she did, she would be as immensely grateful as I am that I have not had to carry dead-tree editions of The Life of Samuel Johnson and Le Morte d'Arthur around with me on my journey. Excuse me, I have to go on a tangent now. Speaking of the latter, I feel like people, particularly my high school English teachers, have been keeping things from me. Why oh why did no one ever tell me that it is, in fact, hilarious? I realise this will have been obvious to people who majored in literature and humanities and the like, but for this scientist, discovering that Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail is actually not a parody but a faithful re-enactment of the stories contained in L M d'A was a revelation. If you were an Arthurian knight whose history was being retold centuries later, you really were in danger of encountering dwarves who would leap out from behind trees and whack your horse on the head. The dwarf would then force you to fight two other knights and when you defeated them, would suddenly and inexplicably experience a change of allegiance, reveal that he knew exactly where you were going and would help you on your quest. Castles populated entirely by women were a terrible peril for all good knights. Every sexual encounter seemed to beget new knights determined to kill their fathers. Also, every joust ended in a bonfire's worth of shattered shields and lances. It's a wonder there were any trees left in the forests in Arthurian England. And do not get me started on Merlin, who reveals everyone's fate in the first ninety pages, including his own, thereby completely spoiling the rest of the book. Within four pages, he manages to fall in love and gets himself sealed up in a tree by a witch, removing him from the remainder of the story just as the reader has decided his character is the most interesting one in it. This was a clever literary device in the fifteenth century? What? I mean, it's amusing, but no wonder modern storytellers are so obsessed with giving Merlin something other than a deus-ex-machina persona.
Anyway, my point is that without this wonderful Kindle invention, I would never have read a good many of the classics of English literature that have been the bulk of my intake over the past two years, mostly because (a) it would never have occurred to me to seek them out without the assistance of Project Gutenberg and (b) I would never have voluntarily carried such massive tomes around in my handbag.
Much as I love my dead-tree Folio (and paperback and hardcover) editions of my favourite books, they're not without flaws. In a country in which you pay a premium for space, owning paper copies of all your books is a luxury that many people can't afford, whether they're a single person crammed into a tiny studio apartment or a spouse in a two-bed flat with a partner and a couple of kids. If my eyes are tired, I can't resize the text to a larger font so that I can still read, or if I have a headache from looking at screens all day, I can't activate the Text-to-Speech function that will read to me. (Granted, the Kindle does this in the creepy voice of our future robot overlords, but it is an option.) Both of the aforementioned also demonstrate the increased accessibility to books that e-readers afford people with vision problems.
I admit that loaning and gifting electronic books isn't quite as fun as doing the same with paper editions - you can only unwrap an e-reader once - but owning one hasn't stopped me from giving and receiving paper copies of books with pleasure.
So while I'm happy to stay old-school at home because I happen to be one of the people who can indulge in the luxury of space for my dead-tree editions, I can't agree that e-books are "eroding our humanity". They've made it possible for me to spend more, not less, time reading and increased the scope of my choice of material. I think this means they're enforcing - possibly even improving - my humanity.
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I don't enjoy reading using my ereader when I'm at home, particularly, although I did curl up with it last night.
This? Oh this is going to be the year I finally finish War and Peace because I can read it anywhere. It is portable on my ereader, as opposed to a massive hulking block of paper that is very hard to read comfortably on the train.
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I'm quite happy to have multiple copies of my books in dead-tree and e-form for different environments. The experience of reading may be different, but my enjoyment of the text remains constant.
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I kind of love the robotic voice. Though I was reading a book recently which made regular references to the Emperor Yongle, which the Kindle insisted on pronouncing to rhyme with 'Dongle'.
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Yes, I like it when Robo-reader gets confused by words. It's the same pleasure I get when our satnav tries to pronounce certain British place names.
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Also, I rarely reread books and I have accumulated so many that giving them away is a chore, and it doesn't make sense to me to use a whole lot of paper for something I'm only gonna go through once. (Sidenote: I am doing SO MANY MORE READINGS now that I have my iPad. Before, I was incredibly reluctant to print anything I wasn't even sure I was gonna read.)
I usually just ignore ebook naysayers though. It's the same thing with say, being vegetarian: why does it matter to anyone else except you?
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The e-reader naysayers remind me a bit of the people who decry another storytelling medium: graphic novels. Frankly I think they're just being snotty.
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Now if mathematicians and ebook designers would just get together so I could read ebooks that reformat to fit the page instead of being rigidly pdf, I'd be happy.
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But the convenience is massively convenient, particularly last year when I was consuming huge numbers of scholarly articles: having these on my e-reader was a real boon, even if some of them were really badly formatted pdfs.
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I'm hoping at some point newer editions of the Kindle will handle PDFs better. I refuse to buy backlit tablet just so I can resize journal articles easily, because well...backlighting hurts my eyes after a long day at work.
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Something I have just caught on to is that books with craft charts (knitting, for instance) can be enlarged. This is wonderful.
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I <3 the future!
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(Your experience with Le Morte d'Arthur is like when I read the beginning of The Once and Future King for school and found out it was almost exactly like the Disney Sword and the Stone. Apparently there's a lot of silliness in the Arthurian mythos overall.)
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A lot of it's just snobbery, anyway - I see a lot of the same attitude from audiophiles about mp3 players. Sure, vinyl on a proper stereo system sounds a million times better than earbuds and an ipod, but there's something to be said for being able to tote around a couple WEEKS' worth of music on something smaller than a deck of cards. And paper books are lovely and charming and don't need to be re-charged and I love them forever, but there's no way you're going to fit a library of them in a backpack unless you want to be paying the chiropractor later...
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This is why I own Lord of the Rings in a beautiful illustrated hard-back edition with satin bookmark (the better for curling up with the weight and tactile sensation of it on my lap and ensconcing myself) and do most of my symphony-and-chorale-listening at live shows . . . and have all the Pern books on PDF on my iPad, and all the pop-dance stuff on my mp3. (As well as copies of LotR and the symphonic stuff, because sometimes I just want to whip them out for twenty minutes).
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I still have lots of vinyl. The silly thing is, I no longer have a record player. I listen to all my music either on CD or mp3 - or live.
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Funny thing is, they are easier to come by now than they were 10 years ago. I have a couple of them, both recently manufactured. One has a USB out and I've been ripping my collection to mp3, funny enough.
There's a renewed interest in vinyl for the collectors market, I have albums that are brand-spanking-new on vinyl also. So you can find them now, if you want to dig out your old records. :P
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I do remember reading an article a while ago showing that the clipping that results from conversion to mp3 as well as the usual results of the "loundness war" on re-mastered albums actually sounds BETTER on a car stereo where you are competing with a lot of road noise.
I'm as much of a music snob as anybody, but a lot of the arguments against mp3 aren't really valid for casual listeners - they simply don't care and there's no real reason they should.
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