Ebooks are changing the way we read, and the way novelists write

[Dave Monroe]

Ebooks are changing the way we read, and the way novelists write
Paul Mason
Monday 10 August 2015 06.35 EDT

Our attention spans have shortened, we’re distracted, and authors have
changed their style to suit, but these changes are part of the wider
digital transformationI


If you hand me the original paperback edition of Thomas Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow I can, quickly and without too much scrabbling, find
you the page where the hero loses the girl. My disappointment on his
behalf has lingered physically on that page for the past 20 years....

[...]

Yet with the coming of ebooks, the world of the physical book, read so
many times that your imagination can “inhabit” individual pages, is
dying. I’m not the only person in my circle who has stopped buying new
books in anything other than digital form, and even the cherished
books described above are now re-read, when I need to, on Kindle.

But what is the ebook doing to the way we read? And how, in turn, are
the changes in the way millions of us read going to affect the way
novelists write? This is not just a question for academics; you only
have to look at people on a beach this summer to see how influential
fiction remains, and how, if its narratives were to change radically,
our self-conception might also change.

In Words Onscreen, published this year, the American linguist Naomi
Baron surveyed the change in reading patterns that digital publishing
has wrought. Where the impact can be measured, it consists primarily
of a propensity to summarise. We read webpages in an “F” pattern: the
top line, scroll down a bit, have another read, scroll down. Academics
have reacted to the increased volume of digitally published papers by
skim-reading them. As for books, both anecdotal and survey evidence
suggests that English literature students are skim-reading set works
by default.

The attention span has shortened not just because ebooks consist of a
continuous, searchable digital text, but because they are being read
on devices we use for other things....

[...]

In turn, in so far as form and business models has reacted to such
behaviour, fiction has become shorter....

[...]

What I think the literary academics are worried about is the loss of
immersiveness. If I list the books I would save from a burning house –
or an exploding Kindle – they all create worlds in which one can
become immersed: Pynchon, Grossmann, Marquez, Lawrence Durrell in the
Alexandria Quartet, Peter Carey in almost everything.

[...]

It’s probably too soon to generalise but my guess is, if you scooped
up every book – digital and analogue – being read on a typical
Mediterranean beach, and cut out the absolute crap, you’d be left with
three kinds of writing: first, “literary” novels with clearer plots
and than their 20th century predecessors, less complex prose, fewer
experiments with fragmented perception; second, popular novels with a
high degree of writerly craft (making the edges of the first two
categories hard to define); third, literary writing about reality –
the confessional autobiography, the diary of a journalist, highly
embroidered reportage about a legendary event.

Somewhere among them is probably a novel that will impact as indelibly
on the teenager reading it as Pynchon and Grossman impacted on me. But
here’s the difference.

I remember reading novels because the life within them was more
exciting, the characters more attractive, the freedom more
exhilarating than anything in the reality around me, which seemed
stultifying, parochial and enclosed.

To a kid reading Pynchon on a Galaxy 6 this summer, it has to compete
with Snapchat and Tinder, plus movies, games and music. Sure, that kid
can no longer see what other people are reading on the beach – whether
its Proust or 50 Shades – but they can see in great detail what people
in their social network are recommending. Life itself has become more
immersive. That’s what writers are really up against.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/10/ebooks-are-changing-the-way-we-read-and-the-way-novelists-write

Words Onscreen
The Fate of Reading in a Digital World
Naomi S. Baron

http://global.oup.com/academic/product/words-onscreen-9780199315765
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l