UPDATED 17:04 EDT / DECEMBER 02 2013

Sick of hearing about it @PDAguerrilla

As an e-book reader and advocate going back 15-plus years, I am getting thoroughly sick of hearing about the wonderful heft and smell and feel of physical books. Every time I hear a discussion (usually a podcast) someone waxes poetic about the physical experience of books. In this case I was listening to the “To the Best of Our Knowledge” podcast from PRI, an excellent podcast that I strongly recommend, btw.

Please understand that I have nothing against reading physical books. For decades I carried books with me wherever I went and turned otherwise frustrating waits in outer offices, airplane boarding areas and the like into opportunities for reading. And some books belong on paper, indeed some cannot be adequately transferred to electronic media. S., a novel within a novel conceived by J.J. Abrams and written by Doug Dorst (and which I have not yet read) is one.

But given that something over 80% of all physical books purchased in the pre-ebook decades were not beautiful hardbacks but instead cheap, glue-bound paperbacks printed on paper so poor that it yellows within a year, the idea that we are losing a valuable physical experience by reading on screen is ridiculous. And in any case, the argument misses the real issue with the ebook versus physical book experience, which is distraction.

Developing concentration

A book demands long periods of concentration. You cannot read a book in two minute bites between emails or tweets. And for many people today the temptation to “multitask” — which is a myth that people use to spend work time playing online in any case — when holding an electronic device is overpowering. This may be the reason that single-purpose ebook readers remain so popular in an era of increasing device convergence. It removes the temptation, particularly if you turn off your smartphone or leave it behind with your computer and other electronics and read in a comfortable chair in a quiet room.

The problem of course is that many of us don’t always have that opportunity. Many of us must remain available to our customers or other job demands even in non-work hours. But that does not mean that you have to read every e-mail or tweet the second it comes in. One of the demands of reading is the ability to concentrate, to ignore unimportant distractions. This is an important discipline to develop, particularly in this always connected, highly distracting reality, and not just for reading. The problems that you face in your career and personal life demand concentrated thought. They cannot be solved while you tweet. And multiple scientific studies have shown that multitasking is actually just a term for wasting time, that the multitasker who is constantly jumping from a task to a tweet to an email actually accomplishes less in a day than the “single tasker” who focuses on one task at a time. In some cases, for instance when driving, the single tasker is also much safer.

Book reading, whether on paper or a screen, is a good exercise for developing that ability to concentrate for reasonably long periods of time. Readers often get so wrapped up in a book that hours may fly by unnoticed. Good books are tools to develop the ability and discipline of long-term concentration in children and to preserve it in adults. They are also opportunities to rest from the demands of the connected world.

Another source of distraction in electronic documents in general is links. Studies in which college students were asked to read on-screen articles dither with or without links showed that those who read the unlinked version comprehended the material better than those who read the linked version, even when they did not click on any of the links.

A strategy for book buying

Electronic books, however, do offer a list of advantages. First, obviously, they are often cheaper, since the publisher does not have the costs associated with printing and managing physical books.  They take the place of cheap paperbacks in the marketplace. And they are much easier to carry around. You take your smartphone and possibly a tablet with you everywhere anyway. Having a book on it gives you something to read in idle moments in the day, perhaps over lunch or when killing a quarter hour before an appointment. Also often you can easily find otherwise out-of-print books such as the backlist of an author you have just discovered. And carrying the electronic book spares the physical copy from the wear of being carried around in your briefcase or pocket constantly. Like most log-term readers I do own beautiful copies of favorite books that do provide the physical experience the defenders of physical books cite in these debates. I would not carry any of those around outside my house for fear that they would be beaten up, or worse, lost. I have no such concerns about my electronic book library.

Also ebook libraries take up no physical space. I have an elibrary that is somewhere south of 300 volumes, and while today due to the space limitations in my small house most of my physical books reside in boxes in my basement where they are inaccessible, all of my ebooks are available to me. I wish I could organize them by subject and genre, but at least I can get to them.

The main reason I personally read on screen most of the time, and have done so since the advent of Peanut Press on the Palm PDA in the late 1990s, however, is simply that I find it easier to read on an electronic device. That is totally counter-intuitive, particularly since I have never used a single-purpose reader with the epaper display. Even on the early grey-tone and low resolution color Palm PDAs I had no trouble with eyestrain when reading for two or three hours at a time. Part of that is backlighting, which makes the screen easier to read regardless of lighting, except of course for bright sunlight which causes most screens to fade out, but I don’t read on the beach often. Today I do read mostly on a high resolution Android tablet, but I am not sure that screen resolution has as much to do with readability as the marketing people would have us believe.

I do also read on paper, and I have no argument with those who do, or with those who love their single-purpose book readers. Device choices are personal, not one-size-fits-all. The important thing here is that even in this multimedia, multidevice age a significant number of people do still read books regardless of their choice of physical device, from a traditional paper book to any of the various electronic devices. My personal book buying strategy is to buy most books in electronic and buy hardbacks of favorite books in beautiful editions.


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