Monday, April 29, 2013

Are ebooks and tablets changing the way we read?


I read an interesting Guardian article recently entitled "Why ebooks are a different genre from print" that got me thinking about the question of whether ebooks and tablets are changing the way we read. And if they are, is that a good thing? The article identified two key ways that ebooks change the reader's relationship with the text:


With the book, the reader's relationship to the text is private, and the book is continuous over space, time and reader. Neither of these propositions is necessarily the case with the ebook.
Contra to the good old fashioned codex, the reader's relationship to the text is increasingly less private as more and more information about our reading habits is collected and tracked by various interested parties: makers of e-book apps, tablets, and publishing companies. So for example, if a publisher or author learns that a third of readers who purchased a book failed to finish chapter three, then they could make future decisions reflecting that knowledge. Unfortunately, there isn't much data available about what publishers are doing with this data just yet. But this is truly uncharted territory and it will be interesting to see what readers and publishers do with this new information. I worry that one day soon an author, informed with information that a large percentage of readers did not finish a difficult chapter, might change the way they write to accommodate shorter attention spans. But then again, this new information might help authors and publishers produce better quality books. It's difficult to say at this point.

Another thing to think about is how our relationship to the text is changing when we read a book in ebook format. Consider how, when reading a Kindle book, you can turn on a feature that allows you to view the most highlighted passages by other users. When I first used this feature I was amazed that I could find out whether other people highlighted the same passages that I did; it also had the negative affect of making me a bit self-conscious when I learned that passages I loved were not loved by other readers. Upon some future reflection, I also wondered if this "crowdsourced" feature could create a sort of group-think opinion about a book, where people might assign an undue amount of significance to a passage simply because other people highlighted it.

So to return to the initial question, I think there is some budding evidence, albeit largely untested and anecdotal at this point,  that ebooks and tablets are changing the way we read. We know that the solitary act of reading is no longer quite as solitary as it once was now that companies can track the reading habits of ebook readers. And we know that we can find instant opinion about the most highlighted passages in any given book on our Kindles or using the Kindle app. I think it would be unwise, however, at this early stage to say that they are changing things for the better or worse.

1 comment:

  1. I didn't know you could compare what passages have been highlighted by other users. I read an article from 1992 where they mentioned something similar -but also allowed you to inherit annotations from older siblings.

    Samantha

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