As I was outside on the deck yesterday, brushing and pressing stain into the rough-hewn siding that is the lower part of the privacy fence on the more public side of our deck, I started thinking about reading and the various forms that the words "reading" and "book" are taking in modern life.
What am I talking about? I refer to the audiobook, the digital reader such as Amazon's Kindle, and the plain old fashioned book on paper.
I admit I am a lover of books. There are a couple of thousand books floating around my house and I love them and I struggle occasionally with the idea that I don't really need to keep so many books. But I do often go back and flip through them and read occasional pages. Many books are read and reread in their entirety. These books are like friends, offering new insights with each reading. But most of them are not rare and I could theoretically get them from the library. Many of them are products of their time and are not necessarily available on a whim. Perhaps I have them because I like being able to call on them when inspiration calls. But I also like their physical presence. I like curling up with a book. I like feeling the paper in my hands. When I want to go back to a particular passage, I tend to remember the section or chapter which contains the passage, but I also tend to remember its position on the page. But that kind of memory is unreliable. Position on a page is different for each edition of a book, each iteration of which may be shorter or longer, larger or smaller than the copy I read.
Perhaps because I am such a lover of reading for its own sake, I have never really adapted to audiobooks, although I have friends who love them and plow through them in great numbers. I know people who listen while they drive, clean house, work out, commute to work etc and etc. Personally I am too easily distracted to listen to a book and drive. Popular music is good for the car because I really only half listen, but for me at least, a book might be too distracting. I would either lose the content of the book or lose track of what I was doing, which is quite dangerous. But I do listen to audiobooks. I was listening to a book while I was painting. I have listened to books on the train to NYC while I knitted, and I listen when I am in the yard weeding or doing other simple mindless tasks. I listen if I am walking on a treadmill, but not if I am walking outdoors along the wooded path near my house. Walking in the woods requires its own contemplative silence. But I don't sit and listen to audiobooks. I can read many times faster than I can listen to anything, and given my choice I would rather read.
We as humans have a long history of listening to tales and stories. After all, before the printing press most people could not read, the transmission of history, poetry, religion,and story was all oral. People would listen to favorite tales and stories over and over and commit them to memory. In some sense, having a book on paper allows to absorb more and perhaps remember less. After all we can always find the poem or passage that struck us as so meaningful. Perhaps in some sense a book acts as an external memory device. If there were no books, we would have to commit everything worth knowing to memory and that would limit the amount we could know. So books have helped advance civilization and society. Perhaps audiobooks advance it yet another way in that they allow us to "multi-task" and "read" while we are doing something else, like painting the deck. In that sense I can see how they are a good thing. But I can't really relate them in my mind to books. It is not as easy to go back to a favorite passage. If I listen to a book that is of the moment I am happy. Otherwise, if I perceive the book as having more lasting value, I still need, or at least want, to own a copy that I can refer back to and look up passages and read and read again. And of course there are those books that require complete attention whether one is reading or listening. In those cases I prefer a book, again because it is easier to go back and read and reread important passages. So I guess I see audiobooks as a supplement to reading, a way to expand horizons and knowledge, but not really a replacement for books. They serve a purpose and are quite useful. After how much of what is read is really of permanent interest or value anyway?
Perhaps I am giving the audiobook short shrift. It is perfect for certain situation. I would rather borrow or buy an audiobook than buy a paperbound book that is destined to be tossed when I am done; and I am not so naive as to believe that all the books bought and sold in this country are recycled and reused. Have I missed something important? Please, if you see it differently let me know.
And then there is the digital book. I adore my Kindle. It was pretty much love at first sight and I continue to find reading it compelling. There is that instant gratification aspect of the kindle, the way I can read a review of a book and with luck it is in my hand a few seconds later. A kindle is also small and portable and about the size of a paperback book. It is not too heavy to read in bed, or on the exercise bicycle like some hard cover books. If one is interrupted by the telephone or the voice of a loved one, one don't fumble to save the page. The Kindle always remembers. The kindle will hold many books and storing digital books is far less space intensive that physical cloth and paper books. I can mark passages of note and automatically upload them into a word document without having to write them out by hand in a journal or type them into my computer, saving time. With its variable fonts I can set the type size on my kindle so it is perfect for me. I am never moving the book further or closer, or trying to peer below my bifocals or get the print perfectly in focus. I even prefer reading the newspaper on the Kindle. Best of all, I can curl up with a Kindle anywhere.
For all that I adore books, I am increasingly thinking that digital books are a fabulous resource. This technology seems somewhat primitive though in some ways. Amazon has a kind of digital location to mark the position of text in a Kindle book. But this does not relate in any way that I can ascertain to other books. Google is digitizing books. There are online sources for digital versions of profosseional, academic, and scientific journals. Perhaps I am being incredibly naive and hopeful but having access to the world of books in digital form seems very promising and empowering. What if there were some universal library that everyone could access? What if there were some standard reference point for locating positions of text in various media? I can imagine reading a book in my Kindle and immediately being able to access he authors reference materials and expand my reading if I wished to do so. This will perhaps be a long time in coming. But it seems like the promise could and should be there.
In the meantime, there are lots of books that don't need to be savored and reread. These are perfect for the Kindle. Reading a new novel, a book about current events, even a newspaper is immediate and compelling. Perhaps devices like the Kindle might revolutionize reading. After all, it has been done before. Gutenberg revolutionized how books and knowledge were created, read, and accessed. Perhaps we are due for a new revolution.
Talking to G the other day I realized that there could be a perfect confluence of visual and audio use of books. Audiobooks can bring books to the blind for example and also to the elderly. G often complains that he cannot read as long as he used to. He hasn't really adapted to the Kindle yet, and he doesn't find the mechanical voice of the Kindle's audio facility easy to understand. But I think there is hope here. I can currently read a book on my kindle or on my Itouch. I can read it or listen to it. I wonder if there is a hope of a perfect world where one can read a book or listen to it, picking it up at will, switching between mediums as needed, and always being able to coordinate one's location and communicate this to others. That may be too much of a dream.
And by the way, I don't think books will disappear for a long long time. There will be those who love books for their own sakes, those who collect books. But most readers don't save or collect the books they read. Most books are not printed on quality paper, most books are not made to last, and most don't have any lasting value.
If a device like the kindle encourages reading and makes it more compelling and immediate for more people, we have made an advancement. The important thing is not the paper itself, but the content, information, and wisdom that has been transferred and saved. If the goal is a literate society, all of these improvements should only help everyone achieve that goal.