The evolution of reading
The Kindle and the web are bringing an additional social dimension to the pleasure of reading
Book reading is something that we can do either for personal reasons, for pleasure, to entertain ourselves; or it can be an activity required by our profession, or simply to keep ourselves up to date with what’s going on in the world.
The line between the personal and professional is always shifting and is increasingly blurred: in reality, we can be inspired by a novel to do something in our professional lives, or a comment about a novel or poem can bring us into contact with other professionals; similarly, something we might have started reading related to our profession can capture our imagination, keeping us enthralled to the last page as though it were a best-seller.
Nevertheless, the format we choose is in large part dependent on whether we are reading for pleasure or for professional reasons. Novels may have one or two page marks or sentences underlined; but text books or essay collections are likely to be filled with notes and comments, underlined with highlighters and any number of post-its. This is where the shift from paper to electronic formats has been most noteworthy, and where Amazon seems best to have understood the customer’s needs.
E-readers have many advantages: being able to store huge numbers of books in a paperback-sized device weighing just a few ounces is an attractive value proposition, as is being able to change font size depending on how and where we are reading. But the where ebooks really win over their paper forebears is that it is now possible to store all those notes we have made while reading them. Surprisingly, this is not a factor that many people seem to value, but the Kindle page where I store all my notes is an incredibly useful resource allowing me to copy and reuse them either as quotes, or to search through them for things that have attracted my attention, go over things that I have read, or share them with others.
Another interesting facet, perhaps subject to discussion, is what we might call social, or shared reading: the possibility of seeing as we make our way through a book, those passages that have been underlines by other readers. On the one hand, I am grateful for a mark that obliges me to read a certain passage more carefully; on the other, I feel that what I am reading has been somehow filtered, that I am being controlled, leaving me ambivalent about this option. I wonder how many people use the override option for this.
Kindle’s capacity to show aggregated data can turn up some amusing results: it turns out that after The Bible, the second-most popular Kindle book is Steve Jobs’ biography. But I would be more interested in what can be gleaned from that information, or from the public highlights a book has.
I’m not sure if my case, that of a blogger and academic, is particularly unusual, or if it reflects a lot of Kindle users’ feelings. In all honesty, this function has become the most valuable for me, and is the reason why I now avoid reading paper books at all cost. Am I that strange, or are there more people out there like me?
