21 October 2010
Music in the universe of 1984.
“The Summer I Read Collette”
I will now write on something more… tangible: the Barnes & Noble Nook. While I’m attached to paper books, I recently bought one of these devices. My verdict, in short: good for humanity. The following are my observations of how the Nook has changed the way I read. They’d likely apply to other e-readers just as much.
- Reading is faster. I read a lot as a kid, but I played even more Game Boy/Game Gear/Nomad/Game.com/TI-83. Which is to say: I’m used to looking at a screen held in my hand. Unlike the bendy, angled pages of a book, a screen stands firm, at attention. It’s this new flatness that has enabled my reading experience to proceed almost twice as quickly with a Nook versus with a paper book. This is especially true while walking, when a book’s form would be the most contorted. The Nook’s screen, however, remains straightforward and crisp.
- The classics are free. The parents of the juvenile Grant Valdes had a wonderfully far-sighted policy: Toys and video games would have to be earned through chores, but books were always free. This incentivized reading, of course, but it also gave me a deep-seated instinct that knowledge should be free. On the Nook, this principle holds true: most anything existing in the public domain can be downloaded for free. This is like carrying the Library of Alexandria in your satchel.
- People can’t tell what you’re reading. If you’re like me, you set your books face-down on the table, because what you’re reading isn’t anyone’s business. I don’t want everyone within fifty feet to know what knowledge I’m ingesting, because they can’t know, at a glance, why I’m ingesting it. I read experimentally; I read to explore. Sometimes, like the autodidact Stanley Kubrick, I will pick a random spine on a bookstore shelf and take it home with me. I do not endorse a volume simply because I own it, as the copies of Mien Kampf, Das Kapital, Civilization and Its Discontents, Being and Nothingness, and Going Rogue on my bookshelf will hopefully attest. The Dan Brown-flaunting mob at the airport can’t be expected to get this.
- The downsides have their upsides. I can’t read the Nook in the bathtub. As a result, I take far fewer baths, which were always an indulgent waste of time. Yes, by the way, there are more showers to compensate. I can’t dog-ear pages or write scribble in the margins of my Nook. On the upside, I’ve started taking notes in my moleskine, where they are more easily found. I don’t amass a library as quickly as a I did when all of my books were physical. However, there are plenty of books that aren’t or can’t be available in a Nook, such as an out-of-print presentation of a failed theory of the mind, or an illustrated volume on the impressionists. You will find yourself continuing to buy physical books, despite owning an e-reader. These books will be a little more unusual and worth owning.
Note: I was not paid by Barnes & Noble to write this. I’m just a literate guy in a semi-literate country, writing about reading out of desperation.
“Soft Sheets… What’s This About?”
A theme of this blog is how the internet may well be enabling the greatest cultural revolution since the invention of the Gutenberg printing press. I’ll start by paying tribute to a very small and seemingly insignificant corner of the web: The Captcha space at the bottom of your screen, which asks you to manually type in a short phrase to confirm that you’re not a spamming piece of software. The understated poetry of Captcha reflects the linguistic abundance of the web as a whole. Words can now be stacked and arranged in new ways. Yes, our attention spans are dwindling and we’re losing touch with The Canon (only temporarily, I predict), but we are more surrounded by words than ever, and this is good for the human brain. Somewhere, a programmer decided to make the most of his Captcha-writing assignment and invent a new, ultra-concise form of poetry. Observe: the internet is not full of idiots.
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