Reading Habits

Regardless of genre, the length of a text generally dictates which platform I'll choose to read it on. I’m happy to read snippets of information and relatively short excerpts on a screen. But if the text - whether it's an academic journal article or a piece of prose fiction - is very long, I'll opt for a printed version. My evaluation of a text’s length is instinctive, and so it is difficult for me to define (I realize that “very long” is vague!). When I approach a text, I determine intuitively how I want to read it.

This approach to reading may be based on a simple physiological reason: I find reading long texts on a screen visually straining. But I think there may be another reason, which is that if I choose to read a text on my computer, I'm more likely to fall into a state of passive reading, skimming words but not absorbing their meaning. When I read a printed text, I am more likely to actively engage with it, annotating it and marking it. Although one can annotate digital texts, I don’t think the tactile experience is the same as annotating a hard copy. Through reading and writing I synthesize, process and integrate new information. I find that when this manual process is lost, as is the case when I read texts on screen, this learning experience doesn't always happen.

I feel ambivalent about e-readers. I have a Kobo but I've only used it a handful of times (mostly when travelling). I appreciate its portability and certain features (such as the built-in dictionary), but if given the choice I will always read print before digital. An interesting experience I can share: I read Eliot's Middlemarch on both my Kobo and in a print edition. Comparing the two experiences, I preferred reading it in print because the text was more comfortable to read, albeit a long and cumbersome book. These innate and charming characteristics were lost in the e-reader.

All that being said, there are some documents that I prefer to read on screen simply because a printed version doesn't exist (or would involve killing too many trees to print!) or is inaccessible. For instance, facsimiles of primary source documents that are available in online databases. Another example: the TEI guidelines which we had to read for the encoding challenge (it would have been burdensome to print them out!).

I think Maxwell in his article “E-Book Logic” makes a good point by invoking Darnton and others who state that "all books are 'born digital' and have been for decades" (Maxwell 2013, 29). Although books are now spawned in a digital environment, I believe the readership for print books will continue to endure.

References

Maxwell, John W. "E-Book Logic: We Can Do Better." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 51, no. 1 (2013): 29-47.