Books and e-readers and that

[nanila]

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.

Comments

[liseuse]

I will never stop acquiring paper books, because I want to read them at home, but I adore my ereader for letting me read - with comfort! - on the train. For letting me haul around all the articles I want/need to read without having to pay a fortune to print them off.

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.

[soliano]

I love dead tree books, but as I age, my eyes prefer the e-readers. I have had them since the Rocket Ebook a long time ago and they have finally come into their own.

[ankaret]

All of this is exactly why the Pendragon roleplaying game is so much fun, despite a ruleset that appears to have been knocked together by three medievalists in a pub. I don't think I've set horse-sabotaging dwarves on my players yet, though. I must remedy this.

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'.

[capri]

I agree with everything you've said in this post! I haven't been able to completely kick the paperback habit, either, but ebooks have REALLY changed my life because they overcame my biggest barrier to reading: the physical book. I know I am in the hyper-minority here, but I don't particularly enjoy holding a book, largely because I have Issues and am of the sort who doesn't crack the spine/cries when a page is crumpled/etc.

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?

[floating_coffin]

Nothing, and I mean nothing, will ever replace that most precious of all gems in my heart: the printed book. With e-books one does not get, for example, the sensation of holding a book in your hand and running your fingers across the pages, nor do e-books lend the "intellectual" atmosphere to a room that a stack of books does. I do begrudgingly admit, however, that you make some convincing points here. Perhaps I will look into purchasing an e-reader. Still, I love me some dead trees!

[oursin]

I love my e-reader, even though it is a fairly basic model! though at least it does give page numbers, even if these don't entirely correspond to the physical text (they seem to start from the prelims). However, what you can't do when e-reading is skim or flick over pages or look at the end in the way one can with a physical book.

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.

[mme_hardy]

Cosigned in all particulars; especially the failing-eyes problem. Many many modern paperbacks are photoreductions of the original and are thus now unreadable for me.

Something I have just caught on to is that books with craft charts (knitting, for instance) can be enlarged. This is wonderful.

[recessional]

I have found it impossible to take anyone wailing about new tech destroying our humanity since I found out about Socrates allegedly being against reading and writing, because they would destroy human memory. Now it just looks SILLY.

[boundbooks]

I love my e-reader because it is allowing me to inhale a metric ton of 20k+ Inception fanfic without further destroying my wrists. If not for the e-reader, I'd have to read fic on my laptop, which is the *worst* for my wrists.

I <3 the future!

[gorgeousnerd]

I looooove my ereader. I probably read twice as much as I did when I was just doing dead tree (and I wasn't a slouch back then, either). It was fantastic going on a cruise and still having hundreds of things to read without taking dozens of suitcases.

(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.)

[telegramsam]

I've seen quite a lot of backlash from bibliophiles against e-readers... and while I can understand their fear of real books losing out, I think anything that gets people to actually read is a GOOD thing. I don't have an e-reader myself but my dad has one that we all got him for Christmas a few years ago that he uses nearly every day.

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...

[nadriel]

I will never stop being a fan of paper books. But the fact I can have several hundred books to read without breaking my back is awesome- I'm so glad for Seshet (my Kindle).

[foxfirefey]

Can I metaquotes your Le Morte d'Arthur summary?