Let’s talk about those eBooks!
A conversation with Professor Naomi Baron about her latest book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (that truly lives up to its title!)
Hi there! I’m Vasile Decu, science journalist, amateur astronomer, professional bookworm.
If you enjoy this interview, help me launch the Modern Explorers magazine, a new science publication with interesting interviews and longform articles.
The magazine will arrive in your email inbox in the shape of an eBook (ePub file and different PDFs), specially designed so you can enjoy it on your phone, tablet, or laptop.
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Thank you!
I love books. In all forms and styles. It’s the one technology that really changed my life and that I couldn’t live without. But I love books for their contents — not just for the object itself. On the “bibliophilia scale”, I’m scoring something like 30%: I don’t have any emotion throwing away a stupid book, but I also cherish with some kind of magical thinking my signed volumes. I also used to declare kind of emphatically that Shakespeare is Shakespeare on any kind of page.
So when eBooks entered the scene, I was one of the happiest bookworms on the Internet. Oh, the riches they brought! So many great titles, so easily downloaded in my hands! My appetite grew and I was swiping through three or four books a week, sometimes more.
But in some aspects I found them wanting, even though I was blaming only myself. I had access to more great content, but sometimes it seemed I had problems remembering all those great insights — so I cursed at my broken memory. I was discovering great books on my Kindle and iPad, then ordering them in print to read them “more comfortably” — but it had to be my nostalgia for the smell and feel of paper pages, right? I was reading the “serious” books and manuals in hardcopy, or I’d even print them out — but that was just because I was stupid and needed a pencil to scribble and chew, to help my rusted brain.
So when I heard about Professor’s Naomi Baron new book, Words Onscreen, about the science behind out current revolution in reading, I said This is a must-read! I know this expression is annoyingly overused, but in this case (if you’re a passionate reader and you’re interested in understanding these new changes in our culture of reading) it’s the best description available.
Speaking from her office at the American University, in Washington, D.C., she was kind enough to spend an hour talking with me via Skype about the (constant) evolution of reading, about its various pleasures and annoyances and, most importantly, about young people and their books and reading habits. It’s a long interview (although it seemed too short!), but it’s a captivating subject and Naomi Baron is one of the most authoritative voices on these matters. I hope you enjoy it too!
I always recommend books to my girlfriend or my friends or even “spam” people on Facebook about this new great book that I’m reading and, usually, they’re about viruses and such, so they often tell me to go away. But this time, I got their attention immediately — A book about electronic reading ? Tell me more! So I won’t ask you why did you wrote the book, but I will ask you how important are these changes in our culture of reading. Is this a revolution in reading?
World Languages and Cultures, American University
Is there a revolution happening? Yes, no, and it’s too soon to tell. (laughs) Let me answer all three of those possible approaches.
The “yes” answer is that we — at least in the United States, but I suspect in other parts of the world as well — are changing our notions of what it means to read. And I’m not specifically talking about the medium we read on. Yes, we’re reading more digitally. But rather I think what is shifting is our understanding of what reading can do for us, what kinds of things we want to read, how seriously we take reading, how much reading is a goal (that many of us will never achieve in a particularly sophisticated way, but still is a goal) and that revolution means that for an increasing number of people reading now means reading short things, reading while one is distracted with the internet or other functionalities, even on a standalone device; and that reading is no longer something that now one contemplates, that one sits and thinks about by oneself, that one takes to redefine who one is. That, to me, is a revolution.
And reading has undergone a number of revolutions in the past, as I explained in the book. We’ve changed our notion over time, as more people have become educated, as more people have had access to print, as education has changed in terms of who we encourage to get educated, so the fact that we’re having a revolution in what it means to read is not in itself surprising. It’s also not strictly caused by the digital phenomenon — and I’ll come back to that one in a second. So that was the “yes, we’re having a revolution”.
“No, we’re not having a revolution”: I’ve been teaching at universities for many decades and for a long time my students have not been doing serious reading (laughs). And you can read a lot about this, you can see the articles published in 1950s or the 1960s. So is there a steady decline? Or a steady continuation? It’s a very hard issue to measure properly. If you really want to know whether the way we read has changed, you’re going to have to do some serious studies and figure out how to make them scientifically respectable, and most of us haven’t done that. So, do I have an impression of change? Yes. But is it a revolution? I’m not sure.
The “maybe” has to do with the fact that we don’t know how much technologies are going to drive habits in the coming years. So in the United States now, and it’s probably worldwide, but I can’t speak for that, there’s a big move from a lot of companies to have people reading on their devices, for example Apple watches; yes, on that tiny screen… And you thought an iPhone 6 was small for books… (laughs) Now you can get even less on your wrist. So to the extent that infatuations with technology end up furthering trends that are in place, we may or may not have a change in our notion of reading for that first “yes, there’s a revolution going on” perspective.
The reason I said we don’t know is because, as you look at the literature (and again it’s mostly the stuff that’s in the United States and the UK that I’m reading), I won’t say there’s a backlash against digital reading, but there’s an incredible amount of conversation taking place now that says “you know, reading is something that’s too important to delegate to digital devices”.
I was reading recently the International New York Times and I found a piece by columnist David Brooks, an article called Online and Offline. In essence, he says people are doing a lot of research and it turns out we do read differently when we read in hardcopy than when we read on screens. He mentions the research of Anne Mangen and that of some other people. So there are lots of people who know a lot about reading that are saying that maybe we need to rethink reading. And these kinds of thoughtful reflections that we got from such people as Nicholas Carr and from Maryanne Wolfe are now showing up in the popular opinion press, the op-eds. And I’m seeing more and more of those happening.
“The world is going to be
not either/or, but both/and.”
At the end of my book I said here are some possible scenarios, some ways the world may go. People used to laugh at me and then pity me, because I didn’t understand the world had changed, but that’s not the way that on awful lot of the discussions are going these days. Recently, at the end of May, I was at the International Digital Publishing Forum, which is held every year in conjunction with Book Expo America, in New York, and it was really interesting to hear how many of the people who were there, essentially because they believed in digital publishing, saying that the world is going to be not either/or, but both/and. And it’s pretty clear that these are their publishing strategies now. That you can buy both digital and printed books, with a little variation in price. For a little bit more money, you can get both the print version, the digital version and the audio version and there’s a feeling that at some times you want to do one, at some times you want to do another, and that’s OK. So that is the movement that’s taking place in the trade-publishing world.
The textbook publishing world is another curious story. And I talk a little bit about this in the book, but I’m learning more. I gave a keynote address for the Book Manufacturers Institute in the United States. What’s pretty clear is that no one knows what should happen with textbooks of the kind we use in K-12 and in college because the print textbooks, the really thick ones that have lots and lots of pictures to try to engage students and get them interested, are deathly expensive and students aren’t buying them.
So there’s a move to say Let’s make textbooks digital to reduce prices. But a lot of the prices are not particularly reduced; you’re not saving that much money. So the new move is to say Maybe we’ll look at selling and buying chapters rather than whole books. And it’s a move towards digital publishing in K-12 and in college to save money without any thought of what this means for education.
But, interestingly, often it’s the people who are the administrators who think they are going to appeal to students by having them have access to digital books, rather than the students themselves voicing that I’m learning better, or not. So what is happening and what worries me terribly is that there are some things that digital books are extremely good for — they are good for factual information, they are good for tailoring to the individual students, so if you take a quiz every couple of pages and you realise, No, I got that wrong, it tells you to go back and look at the third paragraph on page 2 or wherever it is, and that’s all nice, but this a very pre-digestive notion of what it means to learn.
The questions of Well, what do I think of this? are more complicated. Take something like what are the causes of World War I. There are some standard answers, but if you’re actually taking a college level class on The Great War you do a lot more thinking and debating and it’s not just Here are the arguments on this, or on that; you try to think it through. And you take this as a real problem, rather than something you can check off a list of correct answers. Digital materials are tailor-made for getting the right answer. They are not tailor-made for any kind of serious thinking. So to the extent that we have our textbooks digital — and they’re doing all kinds of nice things, you can have a lot of information, a lot of video, there’s a lot of good stuff you can do (if I were teaching organic chemistry I’d have lots of digital stuff, I promise you)... But thinking about the causes of World War, hmm… yeah, there’s some important video stuff, but I’d sit and talk and think and get challenged and debate, and that’s not what digital materials are best tailored for.
So that was a very long answer to your question if this is a revolution (laughs).
I expected a long answer and I’m happier than with a simple “yes/no”, because it’s a very important question, which bothers us all: you don’t have to be an academic, a teacher or a college student; all regular readers ponder it.
I’m a science journalist and I have to read a lot (but I’m very happy to have this “problem”).
I read mostly on my iPad, a wonderful device which I love, while also being kind of scared of it: I feel that I’m not remembering as much information as from printed books and not learning as much. Am I crazy or there’s something there?
Oh, no, you’re not crazy. Some of the research that David Brooks cites (especially the work of Anne Mangen) suggests that when you’re reading fiction you may read more carefully, in that you want to remember who the characters are, and who the bad guy is, and who the good guy is, or is there another subplot? But when you’re reading nonfiction digitally you don’t tend to remember as well as when you read in print.
And the rational behind that argument is that if you actually want to puzzle out a complex argument then it helps to be able to go back and refer. And scrolling is not the same way as paging with your hand. For one thing, we do have a lot of visual memory and I’m talking about this in the book, but also a lot of other people say it, and it validates that you’re not crazy. We have memories of reading: It was early on in the book, on the left side of the page. So when I want to find something again, sometimes I curse the fact that I have a hardcopy and I can’t just look up the word with FIND, but other times I page back and I only look at the right hand pages because I can remember it’s on a right hand page, high up. One of the reasons I do that is that I want to retain my sense of memory of where things are. It’s the same reason, and you can laugh and say that I’m a troglodyte, that I don’t use GPS in my car. I want to know where I am; I want to know how to get there. I don’t want to put my faith in some device that often happens to be wrong. I want to understand where I am. And some people have written about GPS and how it’s removing our sense of spatial literacy.
It seems it’s not just a feeling, but that it has a biological explanation...
It probably does. I just have now been asked to review a book by Susan Greenfield, Mind Change, and she argues that digital technologies are changing the way our brain works. And I talk a little bit about this in one of my chapters. We know it is true that if you are really good video player there are certain kinds of skills you develop. You develop a lot of speed. I think is the US Air Force that found that when it trains pilots, if they did an awful lot of video games, they’re much faster at learning. No surprise! Because if you play Flight Simulator, you get really fast!
And now I’ll tell a personal story: My son used to do lots of flight simulator style games and when he learned to drive (I taught him to drive), he had very fast reaction times that I know they were faster than mine when I learned to drive. I have lots of data and studies, some of which I mention in my books, but are lots of them, that say that there are certain gains in rapid response skills and in the ability to survey the scenery, particularly if you’re doing flight simulator style games where you really have to see something that’s coming at your four o’clock, than if you didn’t do those video games.
On the other hand, there are all these studies that have been done that say that because of multitasking we’re looking for so much input that we don’t know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. We don’t know how to figure out what’s important to focus on and get rid of distractors, so some of the work that Clifford Nass did at Stanford — but unfortunately he died so he cannot continue his work — shows that people who thought they were really good at multitasking were actually really wrong. And that is because when you multitask or when you’re doing a complex video game you have all these different stimuli and you never know which one is going to be important. So you can’t focus on that which is in principle what you’re supposed to be focusing on.
So we’re not that good at multitasking as we think — and those notifications on the tablet aren’t that benign…
Exactly! Now just a quick little story, since you translated the The Glass Cage in your language (note: I’m a Romanian journalist and translator).
Nicholas Carr was invited in May last year to give one of the presentations at the International Digital Publishing Forum. And he was brought because of his work on The Shallows and the article before that. The Glass Cage was just in gallows at that point. And it was very interesting to watch the presentation because he came up and he was clearly uncomfortable — and he’s a guy who’s really comfortable in his skin — , but here was a hostile audience, because at that point everybody said You’re wrong and we’re right. And he gave his speech and there were basically no questions because it was like oil and water, not mixing. It was really interesting to see the dynamics of that, you would have enjoyed it.
Did you encounter such reactions to your book? How dangerous is to say that eBooks and print are not equals, that they have significant differences and should be used differently?
Oh, yes! (laughs) You can look them up and see all kinds of nasty things. I wrote a couple of pieces for the Washington Post and they were in essence perspectives from and pieces of my book and what was really interesting was the comments I got. They were vituperative! What kind of stupid person is this? Why did the American University ever hire her? She didn’t understand anything. Why did the Washington Post publish this? (The venue is called Post Everything.) They’re interesting to read because it’s clear that these are the people who already know what the truth is and all I did was to turn the switch on for them to be able to write something that would show up in the comments. Did they read my book?! Even some of the reviews do this. On the last book I did, Always On, there was a review in the TLS where I was accused of all kinds of things; I read the review and stared at my husband and said Which book did he read?! I just don’t get it. But this happens and I know that.
But there were also a lot of interesting responses both to pieces that I’ve written, op-ed or op-ed style, or to radio talk shows I’ve been on — and in radio talk shows you hear the voice and you can judge the age of the person who’s calling in. And a lot of people who are, let’s say, 40, 45 and older will tell you that I can read on my Kindle and not get interrupted. And some of them will say that they have either an original Kindle or a Kindle Paperwhite or the Kobo version where you don’t really have internet access except to download books or they will say I turn off that functionality…
But nobody does that, let’s be serious…
But if you’re of a certain age, you do that!
I learned a lot from listening to all these people saying You don’t understand, if you have a real interest in reading you can read anywhere. Take a lot of the people who are members of Goodreads, there are people who sit and read…. I’ve seen them in planes or recently on a cruise ship in Norway; there were people who were sitting and reading. It was a cruise ship, so most of them are a little older. And they sat and read (also because the Internet was really expensive out there), but I do get it that there are a lot of people who can sit and read without distractions.
“The issue to me is the younger generation.”
The issue to me is the younger generation. If you look at how often someone who is 50 or 60 years old checks email or texts on the phone and compare that with how often a twenty year old, a fifteen year old, even a 25 year old is checking his or her phone you see a totally different phenomenon. So I absolutely do believe there are large numbers of people who aren’t journalists, aren’t academics, aren’t school administrators and don’t feel they have to always make sure they know what’s going on because they’re on call, or they would miss a lead or anything, there are a lot of people who aren’t living those lives and who can sit comfortably and read on their devices.
There are other people who get Freedom Software or other versions that say Ok, we’re going to time you out from the internet for two hours…. They have to do that for a while and then they undo the function because they just want to peek and see whether they got something, so we have to remember this, there’s a broad spectrum of people out there.
But to me the important part of the message that I got from reading comments on things I’ve written or from people calling in on shows is that it’s the older generation who already has consistent abilities to read and is not doing a lot of reading of many news stories on an iPad and having to multitask, because that’s not what their lives are about. My husband can sit and read on his Kindle very comfortably; I’m not comfortable reading on it. I do lots more electronic reading than he does, but he never checks his email and if he wants some function he’ll go to it and come back out, and at least at the current iPads it’s gonna change I’m told, you only have one screen at a time. But we all lead different kinds of lives and have different work patterns and have different numbers of years of acculturation and I think that is one of the most important messages to keep in mind.
One of my favourite quotes from your book is a comment made by one of your students about what he liked least about reading in hardcopy:
“It takes me longer because I read more carefully.”
(Laughs) I’m getting more such comments because now I have data from more countries which weren’t in the book, like Slovakia and India and I’m hearing some of the same kinds of things.
I’m also hearing a lot of people saying These are not real books — about eBooks. That the “real reading” is done in print - and these are 18 to 24 year olds, so I’m not talking about 60, 70 year olds! And other people are saying I read more slowly when I’m reading in hardcopy, I concentrate better — they answered my question about Do you concentrate better on screen or print? Everybody is saying print, it’s 92 percent of my subjects saying I concentrate best in print. And I guess they know some things about themselves.
Reading your book, I discovered something that should have been obvious to me: I read a lot of eBooks, mostly new titles, and the few of them I really like I order in print. I thought I was only nostalgic, because I caught the years before electronic reading, and then I figured out that I only reread in print.
It’s not obvious to most people and I have a little bit of data about this aspect — my data is pretty old, but I bet if you do a study right now on rereading and I would probably go for 30 or 40 year olds, because the younger generation (with some exception, for some books) does not reread, I think you would find exactly the same phenomenon.
There’s a new study that came out from Scholastic. They do a study every two years on kids and reading. In the book I cite an earlier study they did two and a half years ago, but you can find a more recent one. The number of kids who say (and I think it’s 6 to 17 year olds, but I don’t have the breakdown by age) I will always want to also read in print, even though they are digital natives, it’s up from two years ago!
The other thing is that when you interview kids they will tell you — and I can’t tell you if these were face to face interviews or a questionnaire — but there was this response that I have a feeling of pride that after I finish a book I can put it on my shelf, look at it and say I read that, whether or not you reread it. Now that’s something that I refer to in my book, but it’s more and more people who are reporting the same thing as kids. And to me that’s significant. It’s the American data that I know of parents, regardless of what kind of reading they do themselves, that are feeling that Yes, I really should have print for my young kids and I need to be in touch with modernity and I have to be sure my kids know how to do digital, but they’re not giving up on print either.
To repeat myself a little bit, my concern is when kids get to school, because increasingly, largely for budgetary reasons (and this is growing even since my book went to press), K-12 schools are saying think of all the money we can save if we do the ePub versions, the PDF, whatever versions of the books, rather than the hardcopy version. So that is what kids are being encouraged to use and I worry.
When they stop having both experiences, reading in both media in serious ways, of course we’re going to change our attitude. When I drive into a gas station now I expect to pump my own gas. But there was a time when it wasn’t self-served gas, somebody came out and checked your oil, your water and pump your gas… When I started to pump my own gas and it was cold and snowy I was very unhappy, I wanted to stay in my own car. Now, if somebody comes to pump my gas, I say I can do this myself, because that’s the new normal for me. That’s pretty innocuous, I know how to pump gas, it’s not a big deal, but we changed our opinions. I’ll give you a better example: it used to be that when you bought a washing machine in the United States from Sears, Roebuck it would last 20, 25, 30 years. If you buy one now, if you get 7 or 8 years out of it you’re really lucky. So I have changed my expectations on how long something that is build should now last. I have some old things and the question is should I get rid of them?; the answer is probably no, because they would last longer than if I bought something new and it went though its short life cycle, it would be dead before my older one dies.
So those are changed expectations that I don’t think are good changes, I have to keep spending money, arranging for delivery, things are not build as well, they keep braking down in the first year and even with a warranty it’s a pain in the neck, so we changed out notion on how the world works.
My concern with digital reading is that we change our notion of what there is to read and how to read it and how our minds should function. And if we keep going the way we’re going and if schools keep pushing digital texts — those are the biggest concerns now; not the publishers, but the schools — then we’re going to have a changed world.
In your book, you are very cautious and careful not to make wild assumptions. So let me provoke you: What do you think we’ll be reading on Mars?
(Laughs) Here’s what I think it’s going to happen. There have been so many experiments with digital ink and some of them have been more successful than others.
I think we are going to have technologies that will let us reload something that looks like a book and feels like a book, or looks like a newspaper and feels like a newspaper.
So we have today’s newspaper and you can turn the pages on it and then it will refresh for tomorrow’s newspaper. We have much of the technology for making that happen, we have for a long time; once newspapers started going digital people saw less need to have something tactile. And I think there’s enough discussion about the importance of tactile aspect of reading, my students are talking about it over and over again, they talk about the smell etc. I wrote about this in the book, but there’s another company that just came out that’s putting smell onto phones. It’s like ringtones, when a particular person calls that scent comes up. There are certain things we as human beings don’t seem to want to let go of, which is good as far as I’m concerned. But also on Mars you may not get internet access :) I do joke with my students and I think I wrote about this and I think it’s true: what do you do when the power is down and you can’t charge your phone? They anticipate that electricity is always going to flow. That’s one of the reasons I keep a landline phone, a traditional wired phone.
Part of the question is how smart are we about having control over our destiny, even though it’s a big word? How much do we want to be able to take care of ourselves in any and all circumstances? If I want to go to a place with no internet access I won’t be able to read and if I do then I need a device that’s going to keep working. My iPad may have juice, but it’s going to run out or will suddenly stop function. Unless I lose it or drop it off a cliff, my book functions. And I think that, as we have less and less understanding of how mechanical devices or electromechanical devices work, we put our faith in that they will take care of it, they will make it all work, that may not be the case.
So a printed book is still a great and much needed piece of modern technology.
Indeed, well said!
Hi there! I’m Vasile Decu, science journalist, amateur astronomer, professional bookworm.
If you enjoyed this interview, help me launch the Modern Explorers magazine, a new science publication with interesting interviews and longform articles.
The magazine will arrive in your email inbox in the shape of an eBook (ePub file and different PDFs), specially designed so you can enjoy it on your phone, tablet, or laptop.
For 5$, you’ll get a 6 month subscription (6 issues);
For 10$, you’ll get a full year subscription (12 issues);
And 50$ will make you a lifetime member!Join the Modern Explorers Club!
Thank you!
