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

[kelber at mindspring.com]

I read ebooks on my phone. Very compact, and just holding the sucker helps quell the addictive urge to check my email (as I'm doing now). But it's clearly an emptier experience than reading and holding the printed page. 

I love that mind's-eye search engine we all contain ( directing me to find that elusive passage in the top half of a right page, in the last quarter of the book). Typing in a search word isn't as satisfying. Just as finding the very book you want at a used book store is a thrill that ordering it on Amazon can never match.

Don't think I could enjoy Pynchon on my little device. Though I did read back and forth between two translations of the Brothers Karamazov once. 

The eternal dilemma: times are a chore to read on a tiny device. But they're also a pain to schlep on the subway. 

Laura

David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

>My main problem with e-books is described by the second paragraph of this article: "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."
>
>
>With ebooks, you can't easily flip back and forth with abandon.  But I'm sure that's a triviality that can be dealt with by improved technology.
>
>
>David Morris
>
>
>On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 6:37 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
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150811/5bf96f34/attachment.html>