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

[Joe Allonby]

I love my kindle fire. If anything, I read more. If I hear an interview
with an author, or read a review in the Sunday paper, I can quickly
download a sample to see if it is something I want to read all of. The same
goes for recommendations from friends (or the P-list).

I like having the built in dictionary. I can click on a word and get the
definition, or go further to wikipedia or web search. It increases the
depth of my reading. I have no trouble becoming immersed. My wife calls it
"the Black Hole". Since I usually keep a dictionary or three handy when
reading anything demanding, it's not much different. Just easier.


On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 7:37 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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