Smartphone Reading

The ebook will overtake the paperback and hardback as Britons' preferred format for reading their favourite novels by 2018, according to a report. The UK consumer ebook market – which excludes professional and educational books – is forecast to almost triple from £380m to £1bn over the next four years. The Guardian 6/3/14

The other night I took my iPhone with me to a restaurant in Honolulu. I normally take a book when I’m alone or simply enjoy the meal and the view out to the sea. As I deliberated about taking it, having never done so before, I recalled reading about a person who observed Philip Roth reading on his iPhone at a restaurant in New York. I thought: If it’s OK with Philip, it’s OK with me.

I was surprised by how much I liked it. The text was readable, not too small, the screen was bright and clear, as they are on Apple products. Really it wasn’t much different than reading on the larger iPad. I didn’t text anyone, read emails, or search the web. Of course, I didn’t get very far, as the meal was great and the sunset was dazzling.

I have a friend who listens to audiobooks on her iPhone, as she walks along the sunny avenues hereabouts. She says she likes it in a way I will never be able to. In my experience, most of the people who record audiobooks sound so bland and uninvolved in the tale. She assures me that isn’t true most of the time. I reply: Give me an author’s words on the page, not in my ears. I hear them better on the page anyway.

I confess it bothers me when most everyone I see in public places has their nose in a cell phone screen. Can’t they wait until they arrive wherever they’re going to see what’s up? What’s the urgency? Have we also lost the fine art of patience? We live in a beautiful place on this earth. Why not pay attention to it, think about it for a while? Surely we have plans and ideas to ponder. Why not reflect on them for a while? And stop bumping into me.

Serious reading is increasingly difficult in an age of so many distractions. You really have to concentrate for a dedicated period of time if you are to get much out of a book. I was raised long before the advent of cell phones, even before TV, to say nothing of the web and Internet those countless apps. How lucky I was. Sure, it was sometimes a struggle to find the time to read, but then the distractions were textbooks, essay assignments, class presentations, that kind of thing, all of which required concentrated reading.

As far as I can tell, none of these cell phone-users are reading a book. Perhaps I am wrong. Laura Miller writes on Salon (5/14/14):

Those who enjoy wringing their hands in Spenglerian despair whenever they see heads bent over glossy black rectangles in public might want to check their pessimism. For all you know, those smartphone devotees are reveling in the fruits of Western Civilization—rather than playing Floppy Bird while it crumbles around them.

It seems to me most of these people appear to be texting, thumbs typing away with jet-like speed. The younger, the faster. Or playing one of the mindless games that draw people to these gadgets. No doubt there are subway or bus readers, but I doubt those I see on the street wouldn’t be typing away if they were reading Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy.

I have to also admit that there is something about a smart phone and other digital reading devices that have a Kindle App that is somewhat of an advantage. Namely, you can highlight notable passages, save them on your Amazon’s highlighting page, and then copy them in a Word document. In my case, they are then added to my commonplace book. There I can review them, use them if I want in something I am writing, and pass them on to others who express some interest.

I say it is “somewhat of an advantage” because I’m not sure if it really is. Perhaps it is better if I copy each one from a record I keep when I read a printed book. I know I don’t review each of the passages I’ve saved when I copy the Amazon highlights in one fell swoop. But I do when I re-type each one of them in a Word document. I suspect that consolidates their meaning, clarifies why I saved them in the first place and enables me to recall them much more readily than is possible with a single action of copying highlights.

In the past few years, I’ve changed my views about reading digital versions of books. When they first made their appearance, I was an ardent opponent. And while I still prefer reading printed versions of books, I no longer feel reading one on a smart phone or tablet signals the demise of literate culture. It is reading that’s important, not the format you prefer. It is also about what you read and what you make of the experience, if anything.

It seems I am in good company. Margaret Drabble writes of her “deep attachment to my e-reader…It enables you to read, anywhere, anytime, almost anything. It enables you to purchase or acquire texts at midnight, in the small hours, on a train to Tauton, at a bus stop, in a bunk on a ferry in the Arctic Circle.” Now, there is a devoted e-reader.

She claims her device, one that I believe is the Kindle Paperwhite, is almost perfect and, like myself, she too began and still prefers reading printed books. She admits there are so many ways of reading now, it no longer makes sense to ignore the advantages or e-readers, among them highlighting, traveling, being in a town without a bookstore, etc. She concludes, “…but I can feel myself being tempted into colour. The future is bright.”

The Five "Best" Books of 2012

When we speak of literary taste, we may imagine we refer to preferences regarding subject matter, genre, form and the varieties of narrative prowess. But much of what taste in reading boils down to is less conducive to objective analysis, less neatly parceled into scholarly-sounding brackets. Simply, it’s the extent to which we take pleasure in the company of the author — or rather, a facsimile thereof, a phantom version composed of and subsisting on words alone. Leah Hager Cohen

‘Tis the season for the Best Books of the Year. The 10 Best, the 100 Best, the absolutely all time ever Best. In the spirit of the season, I reviewed the books I read this year, and while it wasn’t exactly a stellar year, at least for me, I did find five that I can call my favorites.

To say they are the Best, of course, is presumptuous; the Best for one reader might very well be the Worst for another. So I call them, my Favorites and no sooner do I say that than I ask what constitutes a favorite Book.

As I try to answer the question, I realize it is probably the one I remember most vividly and that I am likely to recall a year or so down the path. But it must also contain a goodly number of ideas and those special truths that I find in literature. A few is usually sufficient; a great many is a great good fortune

I did enjoy and was greatly amused by one of the top five, but I doubt I’ll recall much about the story for very long. On the other hand, the remaining four were either so grim or provocative, that it would be inaccurate to say they were pleasurable.

But I digress…as usual. Here are the Favorite Five of 2012, listed alphabetically by author with a link to the blog I wrote about each one:

Jennie Erdal, The Missing Shade of Blue
Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
Elliot Perlman, The Street Sweeper
Eyal Press, Beautiful Souls
Irvin Yalom, The Spinoza Problem

With the exception of Beautiful Souls, they are novels, to a large extent philosophical novels. After mulling this over for a while, I have concluded that Eyal Press’s Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times, is the book I rank number one.

It is the book I am most likely to consult again, not only because it has led me in a new research direction, but also because it describes individuals who command my respect. I will not forget the effort of Paul Gruninger to enable Jews fleeing the Nazi’s to seek safety in Switzerland. Or the Israeli, Avner Wishnitzer, a solider in the IDF who refused to serve in the occupied territories. Neither can I forget the whistleblower Leyla Wyder who exposed the Ponzi scheme at the Sanford Financial Group.

Press describes the courageous acts of these and other individuals with great skill that reflects a good deal of research and first hand interviews. Not surprisingly his book is not on anyone’s list of the best books of the year, regardless of the size of the list, but for me it was the most notable book of 2012.

On A Lazy, Dazy Day in August

Anything can happen on a summer afternoon
On a lazy dazy golden hazy summer afternoon
Lily Tuck

And the sun finally shines upon the Northwest, the days are warm, and the Web is having a summer rally.

A poet reminds us of the long forgotten craft of sending postcards.

While the Spice Girls at the Olympic closing ceremony amused me more than I care to admit, I was far more impressed by word of what the Olympics used to be and could be now without any difficulty.

A psychotherapist suggests that writing and reading poetry can have therapeutic value.

I learned from more than I need to know about England during the last two exhausting weeks, including the fact that people still like to read over there and gather together in groups to talk about its practical value.

Earlier this summer I read about a very special perfect moment experienced by a musician while talking to someone who sounds a lot like someone I know.

New Websites sprout like the dandelions in the grass around here, including one that is so rich in intellectual fare that it has entered the exclusive realm of my Firefox bookmarks.

On Rereading

“The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does.” Patricia Spacks

I am reading On Rereading by Patricia Meyer Spacks. It is the first time I’ve read it, although I have reread the first chapter that sketches Spacks’ views on the value of rereading and the reasons that motivate her to devote a fair amount of time to rereading literary fiction.

She suggests we reread for enjoyment, a way to evoke memories, a reminder of forgotten truths, as well as a source of new ones. But we also reread, she says, to measure how we have changed or even if we have changed. “…but for most readers, rereading provides, in contrast, an experience of unexpected change.” She cites a passage from an essay on rereading by Vivian Gornick:

“When I read Colette in my twenties, I said to myself, That is exactly the way it is. Now I read her and I find myself thinking, How much smaller this all seems than it once did—cold, brilliant, limited—and silently I am saying to her, Why aren’t you making more sense of things?”

But for the most part Spacks suggests we reread fiction because we want to re-experience the pleasure we found when we first read a book, the enjoyment that can arise from an engaging story, stimulating truth or fine writing.

The bulk of her text describes the various encounters she has had rereading books. She treats the books she read as a child, her favorite Jane Austen, those she read in the 1950s, 1960s, and the 1970s, the books she read as a professional teacher and critic, those she ought to have liked, but didn’t and the ones she has read as a member of a book group.

In the final chapter, Coda, she reviews what she has learned from all the books she’s reread. She wonders what the era of electronic books will do to reading and the experience of rereading and confesses she can’t begin to imagine what that will be.

At the same time she realizes how much she has “been shaped—personality, sensitivities, convictions—by reading.” She also comes to better understand how the extent to which her values and attitudes have changed over the years.

“If Herzog has meanings that I was earlier unable to detect; if The Golden Notebook, with large pretensions, now seems relatively trivial in import; if the facts of a book’s nature can shift in such ways, value judgments, too must be less stable than they appear.”

Most of the rereading I do is simply because I’ve forgotten so much, if not all, of what the book was about, why I liked it, and why it is (usually) still on my shelf. I reread because I forget so much. And I don’t do a great deal of rereading, since I really only started reading seriously relatively late in life and have a lot catching up to do.

And then I think about those truly special books I’ve read. These are books I don’t forget. And, unlike Spacks, I know I don’t want to reread them again. I don’t want to do anything to alter the memory that I have of those days, the people in the book, their story and the great writing. None of it can ever be repeated. They were the best and I want to keep it just that way.

I’d rather not experience Gornick’s melancholy lament: “I want the reading of Colette to be the same as it once was, but it is not. Yet I am wrenched by the beauty of that which no longer feels large, and can never feel large again.”

Here is a brief video of Spacks talking about her book:

Patricia Meyer Spacks, ON REREADING from Harvard University Press on Vimeo.

Print or Electronic?

At Gadgetwise, a New York Times blog about technology, Jenn Wortham writes about her experience reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s latest novel, The Marriage Plot, on her Kindle. She had “adored” his previous works, couldn’t wait for his latest to be shipped, so she downloaded it to her gadget.

But reading the novel was surprisingly disappointing. Of course, she wonders if it was due to the e-reading experience or to the novel itself, a question that is impossible for any single reader to answer. Nevertheless, she decides to borrow a friend’s printed copy and attempt to see if her experience was any different.

Wortham concludes by asking her readers if they like reading certain kinds of books on their e-readers or any work of fiction or non-fiction? As of 11/12/11, 79 individuals have responded. The fact that so many have done so speaks to the significance many readers attach to the transition from print to electronic books.

Setting aside the biased sample of New York Times blog readers, more than half, 45 (57%) said they either preferred reading on the Kindle or that there wasn’t any difference between a printed or electronic version of a book. “Reading is reading. The words are what matter. You can read writing on a wall, on a can of soup, in pages, or on an electronic screen.”

In response to my query, the author of the literary blog So Many Books wrote: “I get just as much pleasure reading on my Kindle as I do in reading a print book. You know when you are into a story and all your surroundings drop away and the world could explode and you wouldn't even know it and you don't even notice you are holding a book let alone turning pages? The same thing happens on the Kindle. When I am reading a good story, the world falls away and the Kindle in my hand disappears too. There is no difference in the experience of the story.”

Still another 16 (20%) said there was a notable difference and they preferred reading on the printed page. “I simply cannot find the same emotional connection to reading something on yet another piece of soon to be obsolete tech equipment.” They offered several additional reasons: they retained more of a printed book, missed its feel or tactile sensation, found it difficult to skip around on digital readers, or they didn’t handle footnotes and page numbers well.

Only two readers expressed my major concern about e-readers. Both said it was impossible to easily make notes in the margins, although one of them wondered if that was really such a loss.

Finally, 18 individuals (23%) didn’t answer the question. They weren’t sure, preferred audio books, noted either is a trade off, or mentioned a totally unrelated subject.

Perhaps the best summary of the matter was offered in this comment: “I've had a Kindle for about 3 years and would not be without it. The advantages are: 1. It's easier to cart around than a book, so it's always with me 2. Being able to change the type size really helps with my aging eyes. 3. It's easy to hold, sometimes large books hurt my arthritic hands. 4. It can be read in bright sun. 5. You don't need bookshelves to store the books you want to keep - a real plus in small apartments. But there are disadvantages too: 1. You can't loan your books to a friend or pass them along to a charity. 2. It's very hard to skip around in the pages 3. Diagrams and illustrations don't work at all. 4. The Kindle Fire may solve the color problem, but now they don't even bother selling the art books I love. 5. Not every book I'm likely to buy is available - not by a long shot.”

While I’ve been a long-time critic of e-readers largely because of the difficulty of note taking and marking up pages, I confess I returned to my iPad recently and found reading the New Yorker app a genuine pleasure.

I made notes on a separate pad of paper or computer and, unlike printed books, was able to listen to poets reading their poems or musical groups being discussed and view a video preview of a film or a dance group that was reviewed. These were not the least bit distracting. To the contrary they enhanced the reading experience for me, although it is still not possible to highlight passages or print articles with the app.

Reading books and long essays on an e-reader is another matter.

On Marginalia

In this week’s Monday Times there was an article headlined, “Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins.” At once I shifted into high gear and read it with deep concentration, roused from the Net-induced fragmented thinking that has swept over me lately.

The article written by Dirk Johnson bemoans the end of the fine art of scribbling marks in the margin that he believes electronic readers are bound to lead to. The concern he describes is almost exclusively among literary scholars who will be at a loss once they are no longer able to glean the insights revealed by the notes writers have made in the books read they’ve read. How they do this has always been a mystery to me

It is almost uniformly believed that e-readers will put an end to this practice to the extent that notable writers read with these gadgets. However, according to G. Thomas Tansville, “People will always find a way to annotate electronically. But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved.”

The article cites the work of Heather Jackson who has written several books on the significance of the marginalia found in books. She believes these margin notes have considerable historical meaning and reveal “a pattern of emotional reactions among everyday readers that might otherwise be missed, even by literary professionals.” I confess, I have read Jackson’s books and have yet to be persuaded.

But it seems to me the issue extends well beyond the preservation of marginalia for scholarly research. The issue concerns the very nature of reading itself and the degree to which a reader becomes engaged with the text. It is clearly expressed by Studs Terkel, the oral historian, who is quoted in the Times article as admonishing “a friend who would read his books but leave them free of markings. He told them that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.”

Most engaged readers read slowly as they stop to consider a sentence or an idea and sometimes put a note in the margin or highlight a passage to indicate this. And some of them will collect these passages and preserve them in what has traditionally come to be known as a commonplace book.

Not many contemporary readers do this. But it wasn’t so long ago that it was the norm, when readers wrote on the pages of the text what they thought about it and collected their reflections in a notebook. They might have read in a more disjointed fashion, skipping from one book to another to let their thoughts settle in or spend time annotating the material in order to make some sense of it.

This might have been the golden age of reading, the period that reached its peak during the Renaissance but is largely extinct now. What we have lost is not only the marginalia of celebrity readers but also the practice of engaged reading itself.

For some individuals the art of reading, as David Ulin, points out in his recent book The Lost Art of Reading is an “act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read…but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.”

It’s a matter of becoming involved in the text and thinking about it and while that is sometimes a time-consuming process, it is made a little easier by putting your thoughts down on the page so you can recapture them later. Reading a book may take days or weeks, but that is sometimes only the beginning of thinking about it. Collecting marginal notes in a commonplace book enables you to keep the reading experience alive and make the most of its lingering after effects.

The Future of Reading

As I look ahead to the future of reading, I do not share the pessimistic concerns voiced by so many commentators. If anything, I see just as many readers as there ever were, they are reading more, in more ways, and for longer periods of time than ever. They are reading on the Internet, with increasing frequency on their e-readers, and yes, they are still reading printed books.

I go to Powell’s Bookstore in Portland and it is jammed. People walk around with a basket full of books to buy, others are reading while sitting on the floor in the row after row of bookshelves that fill this five-story bookstore. Darin Sennett, director of strategic projects at Powell’s says he sees no evidence that books are dying.

“People do love bookstores and they’re an important part of our culture. Print books are not dead. People will continue to want them and love them. But their desires and the way they want to read are evolving. I can see print and e-books living nicely together.”

I see no decline in the quality or depth of writing in the books and documents I read. To be sure, my choices are highly selective. But I have more than enough to read, in fact, I am inundated with materials that I have always been drawn to. I am not concerned about students who are said to read less and less and no longer write critically or reflectively. My experience has demonstrated that students vary widely on both dimensions in about the same proportion as always.

Instead what I see is an increasing concern about the quality of student education and the nature of their reading habits. And I read about more and more innovative programs to promote the literary arts among the young. To be sure students, as well as the rest of us, are tempted by an increasing number of distractions on the Internet. But there is good reason to believe that, if anything, they may actually keep us more alert, keep our minds more active and more engaged with the text, whether it be on the screen or on the page.

However, I do have one concern and it has nothing to do with purported decline in reading and it is really nothing new either. Instead my concern is how we read. For me reading is a slow process and one that is always performed with a pen in hand as it was during the eras when commonplace books flourished. Like readers then, I write in the margins of the books I read, I underline text, I make notes on the inside covers. And then I copy all of this into my commonplace book to be read again and again and sometimes drawn upon in something I write.

I rarely see a person reading with a pen or pencil and I ask myself what are they getting out of this experience. Do they stop to mull over a sentence or a paragraph, do they go back and read a related passage in the book? What kind of a record will they have of the encounter? What will they remember? Of course, they will remember very little or nothing at all. But if they collected some of their thoughts and memorable passages in some kind of a record, their memories will be preserved so they can be reviewed and considered again and again.

It is a matter of how engaged a person is with what they are reading. When you are skimming pages, or reading rather casually, literature cannot possibly have much influence. But when you are reading reflectively, writing things in the book or on a separate pad of paper, reading can become an experience that will stick with you, will become something you’ll be more likely to bring to your life.

I am on the same wavelength as Ann Patchett whose words deserve to be repeated: “I have long refused to participate in the last rites of what is both my passion and my profession. I meet too many people who stay up half the night racing towards a final chapter. We are a hardy bunch, we readers.”

I don’t think there is anyone who is immune from the pleasures of a book that speaks to them, no one who can ignore a startling bit of truth or a beautiful expression.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Again Ann Patchett hit the nail on the head: “Why are more people reading? Because they are either discovering or remembering just how good it can be.”

Notes on Reading

At Barnes and Noble last night I was given an extended demonstration of what it’s like to read The New Yorker on their e-reader, The Nook. The magazine arrives so late in the week at my home that I usually head out to buy a second copy on the newsstand the day after it hits the streets in New York. To avoid this unnecessary extravagance, I have wondered what it would be like to read the magazine moments after its publication on an e-reader at a fraction of the cost of the printed version(s).

And what I learned is that electronic version of The New Yorker is nothing like the edition that has been coming my way in the mail for ages. In the version of the magazine I read or tried to read on The Nook there are no ads, no little sidebars, no color photos, a fraction of the cartoons and unless you’re reading the both the print and the electronic version simultaneously, you have no idea what else is missing and that includes some of the articles, essays and reviews. Frankly, I thought the e-reader version of the magazine was a fraud.

While weekly edition The New Yorker is also available on the Web, much of the print version is also missing and a good many of the essays are blocked and can only be read by subscribers to the electronic edition of the magazine which is sent each week to subscribers via e-mail. I confess I’ve tried to read this digital version and I found it to be impossible.

I’ve also been worrying a great deal lately about what is happening to practice of reading on these devices. It is claimed that you can “read” countless books and periodicals with them, a large number for free. But what does that mean, what is meant by “reading” anyway? Is it simply from moving from one sentence to another, page after page with a flip of a thumb? Is that all that is meant by reading?

For me reading has always meant much more. It is reading carefully and slowly and sometimes deeply. It is marking passages, making notes, flipping back and forth between pages, and when you’re all done keeping a record of the best of what you’ve read in a notebook or as it’s usually referred to a commonplace book. Doing all of this with an e-reader is not anything I’ve ever observed anyone doing. Nor have I heard anyone tell me this is the way they read with the Nook, Kindle, or iPad. Of course this might be said of most readers of printed books too.

Recently a few blogs have made mention of the commonplace book tradition. Amanda at Desert Book Chick discusses the history of how she uses her commonplace book and over at Kittling: Books, Cathy does much the same in her post There's Nothing Common About Commonplace books. I was amused to read some of the comments to these postings.

I’ve been considering something of the sort for quite some time (didn’t know that there is actually a name for it) but I have this problem with the fact that I need to have it someplace close in order to use it, otherwise I don’t feel like getting up to retrieve anything while I’m immersed in a book. But I do actually need one because at the moment, my thoughts are scattered on post-its everywhere and that really won’t do.

Wow – i have never heard of these – what a simply WONDERFUL idea!!!

I have never heard about commonplace books either. I kept a diary when I was quite young, though, and looking back at that stage, I think it helped me finding a writing voice.

I wish I had kept something like that years ago - it would be wonderful to look at now to see how (or if) I've grown.

And then there is the matter of the future of the printed book, a future that many predict with be short. I realize printed books are expensive to produce and publishers lose a good deal of money on most of them. On possible solution to this problem was recently suggested by William Gibson.

My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they’re able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home. Book making machines exist and they’re remarkably sophisticated. You’d eliminate the waste and you’d get your book -– and it would be a real book. You might even have the option of buying a deluxe edition. You could have it printed with an extra nice binding, low acid paper.

How cool is that? How would it work? You’d come into the bookstore, go to the shelf where the traditional book has always been located, read a short summary of it on a few pages within a slim pamphlet-like volume or do the same on the bookstore’s Web page, decide if you want to read the book, and if so, head over to the machine to print the complete volume on non-toxic, recycled paper with a soft cover. Or something like that.

E-Reading: More or Less?

I workout each day at the gym. More and more often now I see people who bring their Kindle with them and read with the thing while they are exercising. Some are simultaneously reading their e-book, listening to tunes on their iPod, and from time to time glancing up to watch the Food Channel on one of the overhead TVs. All of this makes life bearable, I suppose.

The other day, the person on the machine next to me was tinkering with their iPad. First it was YouTube, then the Times, then Pandora (ear phones in her ears) until I lost interest and picked up the pace a bit.

But not everyone has succumbed to the lure of these devices; there are still a few who I see reading a printed book as I snoop to find its title. Today I stopped to take a good look at one such reader only to discover it was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I should have known.

As for me, after listening to NPR for a while on my iPhone, I generally switch to the local rock station App and belt out a few tunes while I’m getting my heart beat up on the treadmill. Watching the TV depresses me unless they are showing a Red Sox game or Roger Federer playing tennis.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on how these new devices are changing reading habits. Confirming other reports I’ve heard, the article claims recent surveys indicate that people are reading more. At least that’s what the readers say they are doing

In one study 40% of digital readers reported they now read more than they did with printed books and in another study 55% of recent purchasers of Sony’s e-reader claimed they would be reading more books in the future.

The Journal article claims these findings contrast with the recent National Endowment of the Arts study reporting sharp declines in reading frequency especially among the young. However, this was a much larger, random sample investigation of individuals throughout the country. But like the more recent studies of e-book readers all of evidence in based on the self-reports of individual readers.

Are these findings believable? Can we be confident in what people report when they are interviewed by another person or fill out a questionnaire? There is good reason to believe that those who respond to these surveys overestimate the frequency of positive or highly valued behaviors such as, yes, reading.

Since the subjects are fully aware that reading is important, they are hesitant to say they aren’t doing much of it anymore. They are also aware they are in a study and pretty much know its hypothesis, so they are reluctant to say anything that might contradict it.

In turn, the experimenter may subtly frame the questions in such a way as to confirm the hypothesis or if the survey is taken in the presence of the subject, lead them to respond in a certain way. These influences are known as experimenter errors and biases, factors that must always be ruled out of any study in which they are plausible alternative accounts of the findings.

So are readers reading more on their new devices? In my mind it is still an open question. I also don’t know if they are reading as carefully, or as deeply, if you will, as they might have been doing before they began reading e-books. On the other hand, I think it is clear that e-readers are purchasing more books and, of course, downloading a great many free ones. But my hunch is they are by no means reading each and every one of them, at least from start to finish.

Reading Downtime

“I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can’t do anything anyway.” Toni Morrison

Let’s talk about reading. You read a great deal—you must read fast. I read less--I read slowly. But we both keep reading, one thing after another, day after day, month after month, books, articles, essays, papers, the Web, etc.

Isn’t this a little bit crazy? I wonder if it can be compared to eating, constant eating, one meal after another, never a pause to digest or savor. When it comes to books, isn’t it also a bit unfaithful? We read a book we cherish, we admire the author and the way the books was written, we love the story.

And yet no sooner have we finished, then we move on to the next book, the next story and writer that we love. We have become bookizers, after womanizers. Wouldn’t it be better if we stopped reading for a while, took a walk, or went to the beach to mull it all over?

Yes we write about it, blog about it but all the while we are writing about it, we are already into the next book, one after another, like spending the night with one mistress and the next night with another.

Is this what reading is about?

I thought about all this recently after finishing a long and melancholy reading of Silence in October by Jens Christian Grondahl. No sooner had I finished than I started to read Per Petterson’s latest novel, I Curse the River of Time.

I had to stop. Both Scandinavian novels are dark and gray and the days are damp, so full of turmoil and unsettling memories. I needed some sun, perhaps an Italian novel, perhaps simply a vacation from reading for a while.

Have you ever had this experience? The metaphor of digesting a rich meal is not inappropriate. You have a fine meal one night and the next morning you don’t feel like eating a thing for a week.

The other day I finished Nicole Krauss’s second novel, The History of Love. Quite frankly, all I wanted to do was come up for air. I like the way she writes so much. Maybe I like it too much. Maybe I like Nicole Krauss too much. Her first novel is Man Walks into Room. I will probably read it for the second time too.

Can one read too much, too much without a pause for reflection and review? Isn’t it like doing anything too much? After a strenuous workout, physical or otherwise, isn’t is it a good idea to rest for a while? Perhaps the Greeks were right: Everything in moderation.

Physiology professor Loren Frank put it this way in the Times yesterday, “Almost certainly downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long term memories.” He said that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

And yet some of us read two or three books at a time. How can we possibly read a really fine work of literature deeply and immerse ourselves in it when we are also reading two or three others at the same time?

I am not suggesting we read less, only that we slow down a bit. It is like the slow food movement. Take a break, a seventh inning stretch, read your book more slowly. Ruminate about the book you just finished, what does it all mean, is it important or not, review your notes if you took them, talk to your roommate about it, your cat if necessary, give it a second thought

OK. That’s enough on reading. Next time, we’ll talk about trigonometry.

Why Do We Read?

Why do we read? In her recent book, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, Maureen Corrigan responds that we read“…to set off on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things and sometimes even a few good sentences…can crystallize value feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or sometimes, profound epiphanies.”

Harold Bloom in How to Read and Why concurs. “Ultimately we read—as Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson agree—in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.” Yes, we don’t have an easy time knowing ourselves. Sometimes a good book makes our task a little easier, to say nothing of the multiple pleasures it provides.

We read ourselves into literature without concern, as we are in science, for whether or not it is true for others, and if so, for how many and to what degree. Instead, the truth of any literary expression is immediately true for the reader because it corresponds to his or her experience or provides a language for it in a way that had not been available before.

In a letter to Melvin Tumin published in this week’s New Yorker, Saul Bellow expressed the relationship between literature and science this way, “The work of an artist…sets up the hypotheses and tests them in various ways, and it gives answers but these are not definite. However, they need not be definitive; they sing about the human situation.”

Yes, we might say, that is true for me, true to my own experience. This is my story. I have no idea if it is anyone else’s story. But it is the way the way I felt. Or I had not realized its truth until I saw it on the page. That is what a good book is all about, what I seek in a good book anyway and because they are not hard to find, why I keep reading.

Of course, there are more personal reasons why we read, reasons that are not always acknowledged and that change over time, especially for those who have read from their youth. A friend has written to me:

“There is no one answer as to why I read. I first read from loneliness. I read from desperation and to fill my empty time. I had no friends, no playmates. Books were like insulation—filling the empty spaces, protecting me from the chill of loneliness.”

Again Harold Bloom has written: “Imaginative literature is otherness and as such alleviates loneliness.” Does reading literature really have this effect? I am dubious. Enjoying the company of my literary friends is not the same as lessening my isolation. Indeed, sometimes great literature makes me feel all the more isolated when I realize that I will never be able to create such a story or think so brilliantly as the author of the book.

A character can startle and provoke me by something he says and I can derive some consolation from our common views. Yet knowing I am not alone in my belief is one thing, loneliness is something else and its reduction bears no necessary relationship to the recognition of shared belief.

My friend continues, “As I got older, I needed an escape, not only from loneliness, but from my limited surroundings. I read to see other places, to meet other people, to become a larger person. Life didn’t seem to be helping me with this goal, so I turned to books. I felt wise, worldly-wise. I knew the thief, the adulterer, the junky. I’ve always felt an urgent need to experience everything. Yet I am timid at reaching for actual experience. Call it what you will—fearful, cowardly, nervous--I prefer to take much of life at second hand. This has led to some odd contrasts in my life—such as the wide knowledge I had of sex before I had experienced so much as a kiss.”

She concludes, “Now, why do I read? I read for all of these reasons and more. I read to find my own unexpressed thoughts. I read to find answers. I read to find questions. A life without answers is an anxious one. A life without questions is a deadly boring one…”

How eloquent. How wonderful to know that there are others who read for the questions not caring so much if they are answered but simply for the pleasure of thinking about them for a while. And how rare to hear someone speak so honestly about why they read.

Why people read is a mystery and why people read what they read is even more mysterious. In the final analysis it is a highly personal thing and I think it is good to ask yourself these questions every once in a while.

Re-Reading a Forgotten Book

The other day I chanced upon a volume on my bookshelf that I recall reading a few years ago. It was at the end of the row and so it was more noticeable than the other books on the shelf. It was The Green Hour by Frederic Tuten.

I took it from the shelf, looked at the inside back page, and saw that I had listed several page numbers where the passages I had marked were located. I checked my Commonplace Book to see if I had copied them and yes, they were there and that I had read the book in 2002--a mere eight years ago.

If you had asked me what was the book about, I could not have told you. I would not have been able to tell you the story, the names of the characters, what happened to them or really much of anything about the book. All I remember was that I had liked it and that I thought it was a quite special love story. So I took the book from the shelf and began reading it a few days later.

Nothing about it seemed familiar. Not Paris, Dominique, Rex, Professor Morin, Kenji—nothing. It was if I had just picked it up and started to read de novo. I am still reading it and once again enjoying it immensely. How could I have forgotten it, forgotten virtually all of it except that I liked it enough not to discard it along with so many others in deciding what books to save each time we packed up to move yet again.

A friend writes: Don't you love it when a book you have previous read and enjoyed seems totally new when you read it again? The book is the same but we are different which makes for a delightful and sometimes unsettling reading experience.

What is it that we remember in the books we have read? And if, in fact, we remember very little, how then do the books we’ve read influence us? Could it be that they scarcely affect us at all?

In his recent essay (Reading in a Digital Age) in the American Scholar, Sven Birkerts poses the same questions:

What—I ask again—what has been the point of my reading? One way for me to try to answer is to ask what I do retain. Honest answer? A distinct tonal memory, a conviction of having been inside an author’s own language world, and along with that some hard-to-pinpoint understanding of his or her psyche. Certainly I believe I have gained something important, though to hold that conviction I have to argue that memory access cannot be the sole criterion of impact: that there are other ways that we might possess information, impressions, and even understanding. For I will insist that my reading has done a great deal for me even if I cannot account for most of it.

Here Birkerts argues that what we usually don’t recall anything specific in the books we’ve read. Rather we remember an impression, a “feeling” or a “sensation” and occasionally an idea or a character.

And so whatever influence books have upon us has to be very general, a non-specific effect that we sense but cannot identify with any precision. Learning without awareness. We no doubt learn a great deal but that derives from the cumulative impact of years of reading, book after book, one year after another.

Make a list of the books you’ve read. You might be startled. Now tell me what you recall from each one.

We learn styles, values, points of view, a certain sensitivity about matters of the heart and mind. We hear people voice views that are similar to our own and since we admire or respect them, our views are strengthened. We develop tastes and a way of being, and while we clearly don’t imitate the characters on the page or espouse the same ideas, we do learn to discriminate between ideas we do and don’t believe, between what is true and what isn’t. And what we learn continues to evolve over the course of our reading days so that what was true 40 years ago may very well not be today.

Reading Briefs

An E-book Convert
Charlie Brooker reports he’s an e-book convert mostly because “…no one can see what you're reading. You can mourn the loss of book covers all you want, but once again I say to you: no one can see what you're reading. This is a giant leap forward, one that frees you up to read whatever you want without being judged by the person sitting opposite you on the tube. OK, so right now they'll judge you simply for using an ebook – because you will look like a showoff early-adopter techno-nob if you use one on public transport until at least some time circa 2012 – but at least they're not sneering at you for enjoying The Rats by James Herbert.”

Dictating Notable Passages
Dan Greco may be unique in the way he collect passages for his commonplace book. “When I find particularly memorable passages in the book that I'm reading I dictate those passages (and my comments relating to them) into a Microsoft Word file utilizing Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software, with a separate Microsoft Word file for each book. Then later I use word indexing software to create word searchable index of the database of all those Microsoft Word files. I can then at a later date with a word or phrase search quickly identify all of the books for which I prepared abstracts and comments pertaining to the words or subjects that I'm searching for.”

Comparing Paper and On-Line Reading
Kenton O’Hara and Abigail Sellen report a laboratory study that compares reading from paper to reading the same document on-line. “Critical differences have to do with the major advantages paper offers in supporting annotation while reading, quick navigation, and flexibility of spatial layout. These, in turn, allow readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other documents, and interleave reading and writing.” Case closed.

Hero of American Justice
In reviewing Melvin Urofsky’s Louis D, Brandeis: A Life, Anthony Lewis writes that “We see him now as a great mind, perhaps the most brilliant of all Supreme Court justices; as a crusader against oversized institutions; and as a luminously eloquent exponent of free speech and privacy—the right to be let alone.”

He concludes by quoting Dean Acheson’s remarks following Brandeis’ death in 1941: “Truth was less than truth to him unless it was expounded so that the people could understand and believe. During these years of retreat from reason, his faith in the human mind and in the will and capacity of people to understand and grasp the truth never waivered or tired….He handed on the great tradition of faith in the mind and spirit of man which is the faith of the prophets and poets, of Socrates, of Lincoln.”

Commonplace Books in the Classroom
From the very beginning commonplace books were conceived as an essential educational tool to collect and organize knowledge. Even today they can be used in guiding students to a more disciplined method of reading and as an aid in recalling more of what they have read. In her blog, Self Made Scholar Jamie Littlefield outlines a plan for creating a commonplace book in classroom settings. She cites Susan Wise Bauer on the process of using commonplace books while reading:

“The journal used for self-education should model itself after this extended type of commonplace book. It is neither an unadorned collection of facts, nor an entirely inward account of what’s going on in your heart and soul. Rather, the journal is the place where the reader takes external information and records it (through the use of quotes, as in the commonplace book); appropriates it through a summary, written in the reader’s own words; and then evaluates it through reflection and personal thought. As you read, you should follow this three-part process: jot own specific phrases, sentences, an paragraphs as you come across them; when you’ve finished your reading, go back and write a brief summary of what you’ve learned; and then write your own reflections, questions, and thoughts.”

Reading in the News

Fiction Therapy
In the Guardian a writer pays tribute to Saul Bellow’s Herzog for helping him to read his way out of depression. He says “…the novel made it possible for him to “momentarily forget my own problems and lose myself completely in the richly detailed and beautifully rendered world of the novel. I cannot describe the feeling of calm-amid-the chaos that this generated…”

Re-Reading Books
Stefanie Hollmichel on her blog So Many Books describes the pleasures of re-reading old books. An essay by William Hazlitt put her in the mood pick up her favorite books once again. She says, “When you know what to expect you can sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. Unlike reading a new book you don’t have to figure out what is going on, who the characters are and what relationships they have. You know this so don’t have to puzzle it out. You are free to attend to other elements of the story.”

Renting Books
On The Huffington Post David Colbert wonders if we might begin to see the return of book rental programs as the cost of purchasing new books becomes increasingly expensive. “There'd be nothing new about it. In the 1930s, before the modern era of paperbacks, the U.S. had maybe fifty thousand rental libraries of one kind or another. Many bookstores also rented books, as did general stores. Drugstores were another common outlet.”

Book Memories
Over the years I have read so many books and confess that I have forgotten all too many of them. And then once in a while a passage or a scene or indeed the story itself drifts into my mind in a way that completely baffles me. In the Guardian Evan Maloney wonders “…why do I remember scenes from some books so well, as if they were real-life experiences rather than sequences of symbols on a page, and why do I finish other books and forget them entirely?”

Getting Kids to Read
Are you worried that kids don’t read anymore? Kathy Ceceri at Wired reports that she has the solution--comic books. “It seems like a parent’s dream: a comic book based on classic plays and books. This dream has become a reality with the new book Masterpiece Comics. Masterpiece Comics… a mixture of classic comics like Blonde and Little Lulu and classic literature like Macbeth and Crime and Punishment.”

Make a List
In his recent book, The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande suggests that the systematic application of the simple checklist “…can help us manage the extreme complexity of the modern world…Failure results not so much from ignorance (not knowing enough about what works) as from ineptitude (not properly applying what we know works).” Strange as it may seem, he demonstrates how often doctors makes mistakes that are easily avoided by working through the essential tasks on a checklist.

The Apple Tablet

I am not immune from all the hoopla and media frenzy about the latest Apple product. And as I am sure you know by now, the new Apple Tablet, now known as the iPad has been duly announced and will be available for sale at the end of March.

Questions concerning the nature of reading on the iPad loom large in my thinking. Some have now been answered. It is known that the screen will be 9.7 in, midway between the 3.5 in screen of the iPhone and the 15 in MacBook Pro but larger than the 6 inch Kindle screen and the same as the larger Kindle DX.

However, the lighting on the color iPad screen will be bright and sharp unlike the dull gray of the Kindle. And like the iPhone, the screen is said to be very responsive to scrolling, tapping and flipping into a horizontal view.

Aside from everything else it can do (see Apple.com) what will reading a book, magazine or newspaper be like on the iPad? This is the central question I have about the device.

We know now that there will be an iBookstore where you can purchase books for the iPad from five publishers that have signed up to date-- Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan. And I am sure it won’t be long until other publishers sign on too.

We are told that the publishers will be able to charge $12.99 to $14.99 for most general fiction and nonfiction books, which is more than most, but not all, Kindle books, although a good deal less than the printed book.

As David Pogue noted in his initial impression of the iPad: "The iPad as an e-book reader is a no-brainer. It’s just infinitely better-looking and more responsive than the Kindle, not to mention it has color and doesn’t require external illumination."

Will you be able to highlight or mark passages? And will it be possible to save them so they can be subsequently downloaded to your computer? All of this is possible with the Kindle, but as I earlier noted, the procedure is cumbersome and time consuming, requiring several less-than-simple steps. And the same questions apply to making notes on the pages of the materials to-be-read on the iPad.

Apple has several accessories for the iPad that appeal to me. One is a cover that both protects the screen and opens in a way that makes it “feel” like you are opening a book and holding each side with your hands.

And by flipping the screen in a horizontal position, the iPad creates two separate pages on the screen in the same way you view side-by-side pages of a printed book. Very cool and very unlike the Kindle.

But what books are you able to download from the iBookstore and will they also be downloadable to a Mac computer or iPhone? That is also of critical importance to me. However, to date almost all the books I want to read are not available in an e-book format.

I am also intrigued by the IPad dock that places the screen at a slightly tilted vertical angle, like a laptop screen, while at the same time making it possible to charge the device once its connected to an electrical outlet or your computer.

I am been cautioned that this marvelous new gadget is just another toy, that I should stick with the old-fashioned book and not fall sway to the latest digital fad. And I will probably take this advice.

Nonetheless, we still have a great deal to learn about the new Apple Tablet especially from the first-hand reviews of those who have an opportunity to actually test it, which apparently no one outside of Apple have been able to do yet, and we learn more about the books sold at the iBookstore and what limits will be placed on the devices that can download them.

Solitary or Social Readers

Recently a local book club leader wrote to explain why she devotes herself so energetically to the group:

…what I love best about the book club meetings, other than talking about books with other people, are hearing peoples' takes on the stories we read. We all lead such different lives, and come from such different backgrounds, (and are at different stages in our lives), that the book usually has different meanings for each of us. It's interesting to hear how many different ways a story can be interpreted, and I usually come away with a better appreciation for what I've read... anyway those are the moments I look forward to, (other than meeting fellow book lovers! What's not to like about that?!

In the Times recently, Motoko Rich takes a slightly contrary view arguing that reading in the era of online book groups, Oprah clubs, Shelfari, and the countless informal book groups that are everywhere these days, has now become “a relentlessly social pursuit.” She notes: “Publishers, meanwhile are fashioning social networking sites where they hope to attract readers who want to comment on books and one another.”

I know individuals who belong to three or four different book groups at the same time and each and every one of them meets somewhere to have a meal before or during their “meeting.” Are they there for the meal, the friendly chit-chat, to flirt or to have a serious discussion about the book they may or may not have read before hand?

But there is a different class of reader as Rich points out who feel “that their relationship with a book, its characters and the author is too intimate to share.” These readers can engage in all the benefits cited by the leader of the local book group for why she likes her group. They too can reflect on the book’s meanings, its relationship with the works or other authors, and read the opinions of those who have reviewed the book and who might have a different take on it or who view the story in a usual way. And all of this can be experienced without the gossip or the meal at the current restaurant of the year.

Rich also concludes that these two (public and private) readers are not mutually exclusive, that readers who prefer to read privately are not necessarily adverse to discussing it publicly, although my hunch is that a group of more than one of two such individuals would be sufficient for them. And perhaps if the club was structured more around the type of reading groups that we usually called seminars or conferences in college or the Book Salons as in Europe during the 19th Century, they might be more likely to become more social readers.

I used to teach at a college where in order to graduate students were required to write a Senior Thesis and then engage in its defense with a group of faculty members. At the time of their defense the students almost always brought trays of food, (baked goods, sandwiches, trays of vegetables and fruits, etc.) and abundant beverages. Did they think all this food would increase the likelihood they would pass?

It was always difficult for me to carry on a coherent discussion munching a chocolate croissant and so I found myself in an awkward position, not knowing what to do with these offerings, since I was never hungry and didn’t much care to snack anyway.

I guess that is why I have always been one of those readers who prefer to carry out the pursuit of reading and what I say about it in a largely, although not exclusively, private fashion. Nonetheless, I remain quite interested in the question of whether the solitary reading experience in some way significantly different than reading without the expectation of discussing it with others

Weekend Links

“Speed reading is a bit like trying to appreciate the sights of Paris while racing through practice in the last 10 years the streets at 200 kmph.”

“…the Get Into Reading project as the most significant development in mental health practice in the last 10 years.”

“Interspersed throughout the text are videos and links that supplement the narrative.”

“…what people say they do and what they actually do is different…”

“Does "must love books" represent a categorical imperative, an optional extra or a quality of no consequence in a book lover's search for an ideal partner?”

“…revolutionary invention for real books… allows you to read a paperback with just one hand, making it perfect for luxuriating in the bath with a book.”

Reading in the News

Book a Day
How long does it take you to read a book? Can you read one in a day? Nina Sankovitch says she can and has just completed a year of reading 365 of them. She claims she read the novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog in a day. I recall it took me the better part of a week, perhaps more. I don’t know how she does it. Not only that, but she has also posted a daily review of each of the books she’s read on her blog. She says: To read a great book is a gift. A gift from the author to me, and when I pass that book on, it is the best kind of re-gift, a sharing of pleasure and joy and knowledge to the reader who receives it. Read more…

e-Textbooks
Amazon has recently given more than 200 college students its Kindle loaded with digital textbooks required in fall semester courses. Students have mixed views about the device. Some miss the ease of highlighting text and making notes in the margins. A student at Arizona State tried typing notes on the Kindle’s small keyboard but found the notes were unreadable when she went back to review them. She commented, I like the aspect of writing something down on paper and having it be so easy and just kind of writing whatever comes to my mind. Read more…

Free Newspapers
The Times reports that newspaper readership in this country continues to decline. The latest figures indicate that weekday newspaper sales are down more than 10% since last year. Much of this decrease appears to be due to rising Internet readership, the current recession, and newspaper price increases. The French with their usual élan have come up with a novel solution to this problem. They are offering young (18-24) readers) a free subscription to a newspaper of their choice. Read more…

Brain and e-Books
Is there a difference in learning and retention, to say nothing of motivation to read further between paper books and e-books? In my view these are the central questions that stand in need of investigation. Nowadays these questions are framed in terms of how the brain processes the two modes of presentation and the neural pathways that may be activated in each mode. Neuroscience investigators are far from agreeing on the matter. Read more…

End of Reading
In an interview with Tina Brown, former editor of The New Yorker, Philip Roth predicts that reading novels will virtually disappear in the next twenty-five years and that those who continue to do so will constitute a “minority cult.” He says, the book can’t compete with the screen and “the concentration and focus required to read a novel is becoming less and less prevalent, as potential readers turn instead to computers or to television.” His remarks lead me to wonder if fiction readers ever comprised more than a minority of the population.

His views on the future of reading are not new. Nine years ago in a New Yorker profile, he said: “Every year, seventy readers die and only two are replaced. That’s a very easy way to visual it. Readers means people who read serious books seriously and consistently. The evidence is everywhere that the literary era has come to an end.” Read more…

Weekend Links: Books & Reading

Half-Read Books

Espresso Book Machine

What to Read?

Hybrid Books

Most Influential Book

Active Reading

Kindle Killer

Does the reading experience vary as a function of the format of the text? Does it matter, for example, if we read a printed book (paperback or hardcover) or the same text in an ebook or listen to it with an audiobook? Do we prefer, enjoy, or benefit as much from one format more than the others? A good deal of current discussion of the changing nature, to say nothing of the decline, in reading turns on these questions.

One would think it is a simply a matter of carrying out an experimental investigation(s) to gain some clarity on these issues. To my knowledge not such study has been published, although I strongly suspect (and hope) several are currently underway or in the works. Absent such a study, we have to fall back on the reports on individuals who have tried to compare the reading options that are currently available.

Ann Kirschner recently described such a comparison in her essay, Reading Dickens Four Ways: How Little Dorrit fares in multiple text formats in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In her study, which she refers to as an experiment, she chose to read Little Dorrit four ways: paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and iPhone.

Naturally she didn’t read all of this 1,000-page story in each format. Rather she skipped around in an alternating fashion between the four as she progressed through the tale. Kirschner says, “It was often maddening to keep finding and losing my pace as I switched from format to format. But as an experiment, it taught me a great deal about my reading habits, and about how a text reveals itself differently as the reading context changes.”

She started with the paperback version, observing along the way the notes she had made in her old Penguin edition. She wrote, “How dare we think that anything could replace it? Impossible to imagine that any of these newfangled devices could last nearly 40 years. The perfume of the old paper filled the air.” She could have stopped there, but she forged on, turning next to the audiobook version.

She found the narrator competent but uninspired and concluded after a while that the audiobook had might “win” since you could listen while walking, driving, “applying makeup makeup, cooking and in the dentist’s chair.”

She moved on to the iPhone version noting that its eReader application (free) included the original illustrations, the explanatory footnotes (impossible with an audiobook, with intuitive controls and that she “was soon able to bookmark pages, highlight the text and switch back and forth between novel and notes.” She declares, “The iPhone is a Kindle killer.”

Finally she reports she abandoned the Kindle edition of Little Dorrit “almost as soon as I read one chapter on my iPhone. Kindle, shmindle. It does almost nothing that an iPhone can’t do better.” She disliked Kindle’s clumsy way of turning pages and its momentary blackouts a constant annoyance, “especially compared with the delicate swipe or tap that changes instantaneously on the iPhone.”

To be sure, Kirschner acknowledges the relatively small screen of the iPhone which she suggests might be a problem for the middle-age and older readers, but not for the generation that spends house playing games and reading text messages on cellphones.

She concludes that it is reading per se that is critical. “It is the sustained and individual encounter with ideas and stories that is so bewitching. If new formats allow us to have more of those, let us welcome and learning from them.” And she is certain that even Dickens himself would be experimenting with new formats for his novel, “seeking ways to expand his impact on readers.”