Blogging post #3: why I (mostly) prefer print books

When it comes to reading books, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, for fun or for school, I definitely prefer and tend to choose physical books (or lately, audiobooks) over ebooks. I track my reading, so I can provide evidence: in 2015 of the 160 book-type-things I read, 153 of them were physical books, 6 were ebooks (just 4%), and 1 was an audiobook, while in 2016 so far, of the 98 book-type-things I've read, 78 were physical books, 4 were ebooks (again just 4%), and 16 were audiobooks. 

Those few ebooks I read were mainly things that I couldn't get as physical books. For example, this year I fell in love with the fantasy author N.K. Jemisin, and a few of her short stories are only available as ebooks or online (this one for example). These feel like kind of "bonus" stories that probably wouldn't get published at all without the more economically safe digital format. Striphas (2009) examines ebooks and the capitalist economy and concludes that ebooks are leading to the intensification of consumer capitalism and "the emergence of new practices of controlled consumption" (p. 45). So, for example, we have DRM - Digital Rights Management - that limits how we can share and interact with an ebook. But some of the new practices emerging through ebooks are things that benefit both the consumer and the creator, of which this kind of "bonus" content by favourite authors is just one example. 

In general however, I really prefer to read print when reading fiction, because I've found that I don't have as long-lasting connections with novels when I read them in non-physical formats. In 2014, in contrast to these last two years, I read 36 ebooks (39% of my reading). This is because I spent two and a half months in Greece, and only brought my little kobo ereader. However, even though I enjoyed many of these books, I don't remember them very well. I could blame this on the fact that I was travelling rather than on the digital format, except that this forgetfulness is opposite to my usual experience: when I've read  physical books when travelling, I've remembered them better than I usually would.

Steven Johnson (2010) writes about the interactivity of digital texts and asks, "what’s the point of going to all this trouble to build machines capable of displaying digital text if we can’t exploit the basic interactivity of that text?" This made me think about how many of these forms of interactivity are new to digital texts--such as copy-paste, or sending a link to someone--while much of the interactivity of physical texts is impossible to capture through digital formats, at least at this time. For example, things like being able to physically feel one's progression through a book by the thickness of the pages left is a sensation that ebooks can't capture yet. Johnson also notes that "the idea of a purely linear text is a myth," and while he is talking specifically about how readers create meaning from many sources at once in a non-linear way, I think there are other, more mundane ways that books are non-linear. Things like flipping to the end of a chapter to see the number of pages left for example, or looking something up in the book's glossary, or even just running your fingers through the remaining pages in a novel as you read. All of these things are non-linear to the main progression of a text, and ebooks make all of these things more difficult, if not impossible to do, thereby forcing the novels they display into a more linear form. Although I only have this personal anecdotal evidence, I really think these kinds of physical interactive and physical non-linear aspects of books create meaningful links and connections within our minds through their physicality that can give a book a more lasting presence in our memory.

I've had similar experiences with audiobooks in that I tend not to remember them as well as physical books, and I usually won't listen to an audio version of a book I am particularly anticipating. However, lately I've been discovering that, at least for fiction, audiobooks have more unique advantages over physical books than ebooks do: they enable multitasking, for example, and they can also provide a completely different experience from the physical book, through the reader, which I talked about in a previous blog post. Maybe if ebooks could develop more of these unique advantages that audiobooks have--other than just exclusive content like the short stories I mentioned above--I would read more of them.

To touch briefly on some texts other than novels, I will note that I do prefer to read some things on a screen, such as the news for example (rather than in a newspaper). Reading the news online makes it easier to share things I find interesting with my friends or family. Johnson (2010) notes that this is a fundamental aspect of digital texts: "When your digital news feed doesn’t contain links, when it cannot be linked to... [it] is not flawed or backwards looking or frustrating. It is broken." I prefer this connectiveness of digital news to print formats.

References

Jemisin, N. K. "The City Born Great." Tor.com. 2016. http://www.tor.com/2016/09/28/the-city-born-great/.

Johnson, Steven. "The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book." Lecture given at Columbia University, 21 April 2010. StevenBerlinJohnson.com (posted 22 April 2010). https://stevenberlinjohnson.com/the-glass-box-and-the-commonplace-book-639b16c4f3bb#.h0vlibcty

Striphas, Ted. "E-Books and the Digital Future." In The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.