"Shelf Expression" is the title of Rob Walker's article in the New York Times Magazine's August 8th edition about the second life of books (in light of the startling information that amazon sold more e-books in the previous financial quarter than hardcover books). Everyone in the media is busily sounding the death knoll of the ink-and-papery aspect of print like some sort of deranged animal obsessed with prophesying its own demise (and, one might argue, thereby willing it). Walker's article considers furniture companies marketing color-coordinated book bundles to decorators (what is an unreadable pile of books meant to convey? the collapse of utility in design?), DIY-ers building bookshelves out of salvaged encyclopedias (irony?), and artists adapting books to fanciful sculptural purposes (look for Brian Dettmer, Sue Blackwell, Georgia Russell and others). Even my husband has offered to buy me an ipad in return for the liquidation of my library, and don't even get us started on the predicted demise of print journalism...
There are all kinds of studies comparing the efficacy of e-readers as compared to books. Some focus on comparative reading speeds, some on retention, and others on relative distraction. While the results are interesting, and for me somewhat gratifying, my own predilections hardly need bolstering by research. I like to have an object in my hand, an object upon which I can scribble, notate and underline. In this way I rewrite the text, or better, write myself into it and write it into my life. I feel a very acute sort of melancholy when I see old French paperbacks propping up necklaces, earrings and sunglasses in the middle of clothing stores, as though they still bear the imprints of their late owner's hands, the remnants of the reader's gaze, a face, a response...
First, I would love to encounter an actual deranged animal that obsessively prophesies its own demise (other than the human being, I suppose). Its Dr Seuss and/or Sesame St name would be the Prophesolopolus.
ReplyDeleteSecond, I cannot agree with you more that the loss of annotation-by-hand will by far outweigh the benefits of electronic reading. It pains me to consider that the manuscripts of the middle ages, so elaborated, embroidered, and illumined by the hand of subsequent readers will be succeeded by the comment-section of a blog-post, obnoxiously seething and then just as suddenly abandoned -- an indication, surely, of a culture with no grasp of Consequence.
Finally, my only genuinely practical objection to electronic reading, and one while does not apply so much to electronic books as to reading online, is my attachment to the unit of the page. I can't find anything on the internet -- that is to say, I can't find anything again. Upon returning to a specific webpage, I can wander for ages among the lines of text before finally happening upon the particular sentence I had in mind. In a book, each page has its shape, its distinctive imprint, in addition to its content. Book and page can be scanned, not because of a scroll-bar, but because of their distinctive embodiment, their recognizability. Without those visual cues, I am lost amid the welter.
Also I think there is the manner of being lost. With the sort of precipitous nature of pages, one may wander within a certain field of expectation (say, the Sunday New York Times or a literary publication) and encounter something unexpected, unlooked-for. On the web, those discrete fields are non-existent, and one has to evince a tremendous amount of intention. Even e-readers have search functions so that one need never 'flip' past those pages unnecessary to our immediate purposes. How often have I, in the simple act of reshelving, opened on a whim a neglected title and found precisely the passage I needed to pique my curiosity, round out an idea or connect disparate thoughts? To go for a stroll...
ReplyDeleteSo what do you think, ra, 'letch' or 'lech'? I always thought, and preferred, the former but can't find it in dictionaries.