I converted to ebooks. Then I converted back. It wasn’t any thing I could put my finger on, and I surely miss pressing on a word and hitting “Lookup” when my vocabulary or knowledge or recall fails me. I suspect a good 75% of it is nostalgia - I am 50+ yo and my reading began very young as a practice entangled with identity, escape, cope, and their needs’ causes. The other 25% is owing to it aiding the practice of “logging off”, and moving myself bodily into other environments than that of screen-glow… come to think, there are “needs’ causes” there too. But, for what it’s worth, and perhaps this is the entanglement of nostalgia, I went from my books being un-dogeared, un-splitspined sanctified (through reading) icons of identity - purchased new, carefully-read, and placed with reverence on shelves - to loving the bedraggled, paperbarked wear-and-tear of some rough-treated secondhand book, folded, scrunched and bag-jammed and often having had close proximity to bath water at some stage in its life. If it’s a cookbook and it’s smeared with ingredients (like my found copy of Nigella’s “…Domestic Goddess”), well, that’s like adopting a rescue dog and embracing all of its unknown history, and all of its “needs’ causes”. A curious wonder. Ebooks… ebooks are a wonder too, and the way something like a nook or a kindle or even an ipad (mini) augment the way our brain works while reading - bookmarking, search, notes, lookups, cross-references, highlights - is perhaps something that augments our abilities the same way calculators enabled time and ability to understand greater mathematical concepts without getting hung short on the drudgework of times-tables. So I in no way belittle or diminish them. But I recognise what I want from books, even if it’s nostalgia and “comfort-food” and “old days”… I recognise what I need, and that in turn helps me recollect and look at my causes. And perhaps get a little bit better.
That's a good point you make about the ease of looking up the meaning of words in e-books. I had forgotten, but now that you mention it, I recall being quite impressed when I realised I could do that with the one e-book I read many years ago. Nostalgia definitely plays a part in my love of print, too, and I notice it in my reaction to the smell of a book or newspaper. One whiff and it's like a weight lifts, just a little. And I agree with the need to log off. It probably factors as a higher percentage for me. My favourite place to be is always where there is no phone reception.
Secondhand books sure do tell more than one story :) I'm a big fan of library books too, especially the ones with date stamps.
I suppose my biggest fear about reading the newspaper solely through a screen is the possibility that I'll fail to read something that my cognitive bias has no interest in based on the headline alone, but that I may have read had my eyes scanned past a pull quote or image in print. It's these stories that often broadened by understanding beyond issues that I'm naturally inclined to take an interest in.
I hate ebooks and digital newspapers. I feel I'm pushing against the tide on this one. I think we lose something from curating what news we want to look at and that those incidental articles that we read in the (actual) paper are getting lost and our views are narrowing. With books, I love the feel of them, the ability to move back and forwards between pages, dogearring things that catch my eye, pressing them into someone's hands.
I agree, books do indeed feel and smell wonderful, Meg. And I miss the paper. I've been reading my digital subscription in the weeks since I wrote this and while I feel I'm getting my news, I also sense I'm missing a lot.
We stopped our subscription a couple of years ago. Now I buy the paper on Saturdays now so I can spread it out and read it from end to end. It’s a compromise
I also miss slowly working my way through the morning paper. The print edition of the LA Times became something not worth reading quite a while ago.
Digital newspapers, IMHO, lack the same quality of writing as print editions had. The cost of paper created a kind of discipline that digital doesn't have.
You're right Fred, quality sure is hard to find these days. We were reluctant to subscribe because the quality has declined so much, but it's a self-fulfilling cycle, so we did in the end. Without support, they disappear entirely. I've watched the industry collapse since the internet first started to suck the money out of advertising 20 years ago. The number of news staff employed is a fraction of what it used to be and the few journos left don't have the luxury of time to investigate issues. On the contrary, they're forced to get the story on the web as fast as possible, then on to the next. The offshoring of sub-editorial roles has compounded the issue, as well as the influence of advertisers who now have more sway than ever before.
Despite the decline in quality, I still enjoyed the routine of flicking trough the paper. The Age was the last 'paper' newspaper we would get (also in part because it was the only decent one available in the rural area I live). I have a lot of online sources I go to these days. I find out what I need to know, but it doesn't feel the same.
Haha, I was always much better at the giant sudoku. You'd be glad to know that you can still get them online with a 'premium' subscription, which is $1 more a week. These days, any attempt to do a crossword or sudoku entails a child climbing over me trying to grab the pen and learn to draw letters and numbers in the boxes too. So I don't do the crosswords or sudoku anymore, at least, not with coherent answers :)
Questions we should all be asking ourselves, as writers and readers, aren't they?
About the information processing aspect: I suspect this is why, a quarter century (or so) after the imminent demise of the schoolbook was first confidently predicted, the schoolbook publishing industry is still alive and in robust good health. At least, the little corner of it where my royalties, my entire income, accrue is doing fine. I thought COVID might skew classes towards e-books, but that hasn't happened, at least not in German or Austrian classrooms. Waaay back in 1995 I remember getting all fired up about the pedagogical possibilities of digital platforms for language teaching, harnessing gameplay and multiplayer features and multimedia learning. That I didn't bet my career on it was a matter of dumb luck, but I'm very glad I didn't.
I subscribe to Scientific American, and chose the print + digital option. I read a great deal on my phone, these days, but it's still nice to have the physical publication hanging around, to be read over breakfast or lunch. And I have a couple of paperback novels on the go, on my side table, a lot more on my TBR shelf, though I don't get through them as quickly these days.
As you know, I publish a lot online, but I still regard those as drafts, and probably always will. The story just ain't finished until I've got the book in my hand.
AI will likely work in your favour too. My husband is a secondary school teacher and more and more he needs to get the kids working off their laptops so they do the work without AI writing their answers for them.
I share the same feeling about print. Substack is my play space. Everything I do here is a first draft at the moment. It's a nice way to fill in the time between now and the kids starting school, when I can get stuck into serious business.
Yes, to the 'play space'. I don't really get those authors who beaver away in a garret somewhere for years on their magnum opus without showing it to a soul. Chuck it on the internet and see whether I still like it in a week's time is more my modus operandi. It helps somehow with distancing myself from what I've just written.
If I had my druthers, we'd all have Substack cracked open on our laps, but, sigh, screen is a very, very close second. (And thanks for the shout-out on the Ukraine piece.) 🙏 🇺🇦
You're welcome Adam. It's important that we don't forget what's happening in Ukraine.
A vote for screen! It's interesting, I was just thinking that perhaps the reason I don't imagine people loving their e-books as much as paper books is because people rarely share photos of their e-books. They just don't photograph as well :)
It's so much more enjoyable to read that way, isn't it. That's sad to hear about your local paper. Our local paper thankfully is not owned by a conglomerate. If it were, they would have shut the whole thing down by now. But it has issues of its own and lacks depth. Even so, I'm grateful it exists in this environment.
Do you know if Kindles still popular in North America? Or do people largely use tablets for e-books?
Sounds similar to here. If I had to choose, I'd prefer the non-glary screen of an e-reader over a tablet, but I'm hesitant to buy another device. I'll probably end up as one of those people talking on a tablet-sized phone if push came to shove :)
I converted to ebooks. Then I converted back. It wasn’t any thing I could put my finger on, and I surely miss pressing on a word and hitting “Lookup” when my vocabulary or knowledge or recall fails me. I suspect a good 75% of it is nostalgia - I am 50+ yo and my reading began very young as a practice entangled with identity, escape, cope, and their needs’ causes. The other 25% is owing to it aiding the practice of “logging off”, and moving myself bodily into other environments than that of screen-glow… come to think, there are “needs’ causes” there too. But, for what it’s worth, and perhaps this is the entanglement of nostalgia, I went from my books being un-dogeared, un-splitspined sanctified (through reading) icons of identity - purchased new, carefully-read, and placed with reverence on shelves - to loving the bedraggled, paperbarked wear-and-tear of some rough-treated secondhand book, folded, scrunched and bag-jammed and often having had close proximity to bath water at some stage in its life. If it’s a cookbook and it’s smeared with ingredients (like my found copy of Nigella’s “…Domestic Goddess”), well, that’s like adopting a rescue dog and embracing all of its unknown history, and all of its “needs’ causes”. A curious wonder. Ebooks… ebooks are a wonder too, and the way something like a nook or a kindle or even an ipad (mini) augment the way our brain works while reading - bookmarking, search, notes, lookups, cross-references, highlights - is perhaps something that augments our abilities the same way calculators enabled time and ability to understand greater mathematical concepts without getting hung short on the drudgework of times-tables. So I in no way belittle or diminish them. But I recognise what I want from books, even if it’s nostalgia and “comfort-food” and “old days”… I recognise what I need, and that in turn helps me recollect and look at my causes. And perhaps get a little bit better.
That's a good point you make about the ease of looking up the meaning of words in e-books. I had forgotten, but now that you mention it, I recall being quite impressed when I realised I could do that with the one e-book I read many years ago. Nostalgia definitely plays a part in my love of print, too, and I notice it in my reaction to the smell of a book or newspaper. One whiff and it's like a weight lifts, just a little. And I agree with the need to log off. It probably factors as a higher percentage for me. My favourite place to be is always where there is no phone reception.
Secondhand books sure do tell more than one story :) I'm a big fan of library books too, especially the ones with date stamps.
I suppose my biggest fear about reading the newspaper solely through a screen is the possibility that I'll fail to read something that my cognitive bias has no interest in based on the headline alone, but that I may have read had my eyes scanned past a pull quote or image in print. It's these stories that often broadened by understanding beyond issues that I'm naturally inclined to take an interest in.
I hate ebooks and digital newspapers. I feel I'm pushing against the tide on this one. I think we lose something from curating what news we want to look at and that those incidental articles that we read in the (actual) paper are getting lost and our views are narrowing. With books, I love the feel of them, the ability to move back and forwards between pages, dogearring things that catch my eye, pressing them into someone's hands.
I agree, books do indeed feel and smell wonderful, Meg. And I miss the paper. I've been reading my digital subscription in the weeks since I wrote this and while I feel I'm getting my news, I also sense I'm missing a lot.
We stopped our subscription a couple of years ago. Now I buy the paper on Saturdays now so I can spread it out and read it from end to end. It’s a compromise
I also miss slowly working my way through the morning paper. The print edition of the LA Times became something not worth reading quite a while ago.
Digital newspapers, IMHO, lack the same quality of writing as print editions had. The cost of paper created a kind of discipline that digital doesn't have.
You're right Fred, quality sure is hard to find these days. We were reluctant to subscribe because the quality has declined so much, but it's a self-fulfilling cycle, so we did in the end. Without support, they disappear entirely. I've watched the industry collapse since the internet first started to suck the money out of advertising 20 years ago. The number of news staff employed is a fraction of what it used to be and the few journos left don't have the luxury of time to investigate issues. On the contrary, they're forced to get the story on the web as fast as possible, then on to the next. The offshoring of sub-editorial roles has compounded the issue, as well as the influence of advertisers who now have more sway than ever before.
Despite the decline in quality, I still enjoyed the routine of flicking trough the paper. The Age was the last 'paper' newspaper we would get (also in part because it was the only decent one available in the rural area I live). I have a lot of online sources I go to these days. I find out what I need to know, but it doesn't feel the same.
But... but... what about the crossword?!?!
Haha, I was always much better at the giant sudoku. You'd be glad to know that you can still get them online with a 'premium' subscription, which is $1 more a week. These days, any attempt to do a crossword or sudoku entails a child climbing over me trying to grab the pen and learn to draw letters and numbers in the boxes too. So I don't do the crosswords or sudoku anymore, at least, not with coherent answers :)
Questions we should all be asking ourselves, as writers and readers, aren't they?
About the information processing aspect: I suspect this is why, a quarter century (or so) after the imminent demise of the schoolbook was first confidently predicted, the schoolbook publishing industry is still alive and in robust good health. At least, the little corner of it where my royalties, my entire income, accrue is doing fine. I thought COVID might skew classes towards e-books, but that hasn't happened, at least not in German or Austrian classrooms. Waaay back in 1995 I remember getting all fired up about the pedagogical possibilities of digital platforms for language teaching, harnessing gameplay and multiplayer features and multimedia learning. That I didn't bet my career on it was a matter of dumb luck, but I'm very glad I didn't.
I subscribe to Scientific American, and chose the print + digital option. I read a great deal on my phone, these days, but it's still nice to have the physical publication hanging around, to be read over breakfast or lunch. And I have a couple of paperback novels on the go, on my side table, a lot more on my TBR shelf, though I don't get through them as quickly these days.
As you know, I publish a lot online, but I still regard those as drafts, and probably always will. The story just ain't finished until I've got the book in my hand.
AI will likely work in your favour too. My husband is a secondary school teacher and more and more he needs to get the kids working off their laptops so they do the work without AI writing their answers for them.
I share the same feeling about print. Substack is my play space. Everything I do here is a first draft at the moment. It's a nice way to fill in the time between now and the kids starting school, when I can get stuck into serious business.
Yes, to the 'play space'. I don't really get those authors who beaver away in a garret somewhere for years on their magnum opus without showing it to a soul. Chuck it on the internet and see whether I still like it in a week's time is more my modus operandi. It helps somehow with distancing myself from what I've just written.
If I had my druthers, we'd all have Substack cracked open on our laps, but, sigh, screen is a very, very close second. (And thanks for the shout-out on the Ukraine piece.) 🙏 🇺🇦
You're welcome Adam. It's important that we don't forget what's happening in Ukraine.
A vote for screen! It's interesting, I was just thinking that perhaps the reason I don't imagine people loving their e-books as much as paper books is because people rarely share photos of their e-books. They just don't photograph as well :)
It's so much more enjoyable to read that way, isn't it. That's sad to hear about your local paper. Our local paper thankfully is not owned by a conglomerate. If it were, they would have shut the whole thing down by now. But it has issues of its own and lacks depth. Even so, I'm grateful it exists in this environment.
Do you know if Kindles still popular in North America? Or do people largely use tablets for e-books?
Sounds similar to here. If I had to choose, I'd prefer the non-glary screen of an e-reader over a tablet, but I'm hesitant to buy another device. I'll probably end up as one of those people talking on a tablet-sized phone if push came to shove :)