Being a website and all, and publishing in electronic format, for now at least, I think a lot about screen reading. if:book and its London counterpart, bookfutures, also think about these things.
I encounter a lot of resistance to screen reading. There are a variety of reasons people tell me they prefer printed work to online work: it's portable, it's easier on the eyes, it's a more visceral experience, it's a key part of social interaction between poets to be able to exchange work at readings etc. All of these are valid points, but research is showing that aesthetic preferences might not be the only reason we're struggling to take things in. Save for a small subset of us, I should imagine that reading in print is still a more pleasurable experience. For instance, how many links have I included in this post so far? I count four, and here's another one about a pointless online video dictionary as well. Now, if this was in print, I could either make the assumption you knew about these things and leave you to seek them out by yourself if you did not, or I could include a brief precis of each article I link to which would save you a lot of bother. However, by leaving these as open, readily accessible links, I now give you the option to move away from this piece - perhaps you haven't even got this far, but if you haven't you wouldn't have read that which negates my saying of it, which if you were reading this in print, probably would not be the case, even with the references I had included, because chances are you would have waited until the end before shooting off to the library/Wikipedia.
When you sit down with a printed essay, or a book, it is a closed world save for your own instantly accessible brain and any conscious choice you make to seek out references made within what you are reading. With screen reading, it is not distraction that is the problem but the hardwired notion of multi-tasking. Let's take the best case scenario for screen reading on a computer - the PDF. Here, your web browser or program is occupied by a white space with text on it. Fantastic. But are you going to bookmark it or save it or read it and then leave it? Do you need another tab or window open with Wikipedia ready in case there are any terms you want to look up? Is your dock or start menu crying out for you to stick some background music on while you are reading? Come to think of it, that browser is uglier than you remember and it might be worth popping over to Mozilla to download something a little better to read this PDF on. It's not a question of discipline, it's a question of medium. Even when concentrating on the most difficult essay, say, we will pause to put Tom Raworth's latest mix on, because that's how our minds are trained to use computers. Screen reading is blessed by the curse of instancy - computers are tools of efficiency designed to allow us to consume as much information and distribute as much information as possible, not to assimilate it. That is still the job of the printed word.
Eventually, perhaps sooner than we think, economic and logistical factors will mean most of us will be carrying our libraries with us. With the inexorable rise of the e-reader, Chris Meade says, 'The book becomes an experience rather than an object - which seems quite healthy to me.' The printed book will remain as a fetish object - maybe we'll even see a phoenix from the flames-style resurrection of the independent bookseller as the massive stores like Borders and Waterstone's move their presence online. The question is whether the key e-reader - the iPod of the e-reader world, will usher in a happy balance of accessibility and focus, or present us with a bewildering array of linkage, built-in music playing facilities and instant web access. If the latter is the case, even with an e-reader in our pockets, I should imagine most of us will still be trekking to the nearest book shop.
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Saturday 20 September, 2008