Ironically, there is a band called "The Books." You may have heard of them. Besides making (in my opinion) beautiful music, in their live shows they combine music with digital media clips to create this sculpture of image and sound. Often the mental and emotional stimulation of one song is comparable to how one may feel after reading a good book... only here is the absence of books, or even the supplement?

I think the resistance to e-readers, or part of the nostalgia we feel for books, has to do with human identity. Just like it may make us uneasy that mixed media music can replace a book, it also makes us uneasy that a computer can replace a person or replace an act that "defines" us. I'll admit, it makes me uncomfortable to think of a world where a kid takes their constant internet stream and e-reader devices for granted. A world where someone aches to fall into a screen of words rather than a page. Yet, as lines of boundaries are challenged, moved, dissolved, or discovered to have never been there in the first place, we are put in the position to redefine or throw out categories we once relied on. Is there a category of "human" if computers can do what humans can do? If animals can?

I think it is okay to never rest confident in a category.

E-reader cover

This site has an unusual cover for ipads and kindles. It is a handmade "book" for your e-reader.

Bobbing for Readers

If you had to choose today to purchase an ereader device--i.e. Amazon's Kindle, B&N's Nook, Apple's iPad, Spring Design's Alex, Sony's Reader, etc., which would it be and why?

I'll save my books, but not my e-reader

While I cannot deny that the availability and most likely the price of books will be much easier to deal with thanks to e-readers, my sentimentality ultimately is the dominant force behind my opinions. There is nothing I love more than walking through old libraries, used bookstores, running my fingers along old, musty spines, picking up the odd book and enjoying investigating what a previous reader has underlined, commented on or otherwise marked. One of my favorite books is one which I bought used, and the pleasure of reading it (it was Diary by Chuck Palahniuk) was magnified by the random underlinings and scribblings of its previous owner. I felt connected to this person because I think you can tell a lot about someone just based on simple things like what they thought worth underlining. It lets you know what ideas meant something, connected with this person. Experiences like that are so valuable to me.

Perhaps I will be the biggest Luddite in this group. I find myself opposing certain forms of technology at every turn. It's a miracle, quite frankly, that I have figured out how to work blogger, I don't understand half the functions of my computer, and my cell phones have a high mortality rate. I love books. I love owning them. Love smelling them. Love feeling the way the pages fray over time, the way you can tell which ones are loved best. I love being able to share them with people, being able to share that little piece of who I am (because I have very specific and intimate memories and feelings associated with all my books, I feel that they've helped me become who I am). The very thought of replacing my carefully collected and deeply adored books with some machine horrifies me. I realize that e-readers make so many things possible that we never thought of before...but I just can't get on board with it completely.

The points made below by Sarah Jordan about technology tending towards human-like qualities is possibly what horrifies me the most. Whether we are becoming more like technology or technology is becoming more like us feels like a very fine, very petty distinction to me. Either way, the lines of separation are getting smaller and smaller. I won't deny that technology has done great things for us medically and scientifically, I just think we should stop while we're ahead. The day I am asked to replace my books with an e-reader is the day I give up on society. My mother has never realized it, but I'm serious when I say that the only things I'm going to save or worry about in the event of a fire are my books. I don't think I could say the same thing about an e-reader.

The Price We Pay

This semester, after I chose to take three reading-intensive courses and three Honors courses, I realized shortly after that I had also chosen to spend almost two thousand dollars on textbooks.
The Kindle, supposedly, is much cheaper than a bookstore, enabling one to instantly purchase full literary anthologies for a dollar. Even a few Iphone apps feature extensive collections of short stories and poetry for mere cents, and, somewhat relatedly, lately Itunes has made available highly ranked professor's lectures on Itunes U for free. Literary knowledge abounds these days at a lower price than ever--and, as Kindles and other e-readers are continually popularized, the price gets only lower.
How, coming from a writer's perspective, can this be negative?

As it turns out, quite simply. I, being a writer, tend to make a big deal out of books. When I need a new story to enthrall me, I care about the journey to find it. I decide which local bookstore I'm in the mood to visit with on that particular day. Often, I choose to walk to said bookstore (notebook in hand so I can scribble random observations along the way)--preferably one with which I already have some sort of rapport with the owner and employees (Here, Blue Cypress on Oak Street is my favorite for used books, while Maple Street Bookshop is my usual choice for newer titles. At home, Farley's, a famous hole-in-the-wall in New Hope, PA has been almost a second home to me since I was thirteen.) Usually, once arriving, I'm apt to spend a few hours perusing titles, reading and replacing, sometimes even agonizing, before making a choice. During that time, I'm overhearing conversations of other book-buyers and employees, recommending books, trading views on everything from fiction to poetry to local author readings and events--all knowledge and experience that I can't get out of an e-book.

Sure, I oversentimentalize. But, books have changed my life, and every time I buy a new one, I'm opening myself to another potential change. Books force me to understand the people around me, to learn about different cultures and ideas--in short, to grow. I don't want to grow with a credit card and the click of a button. For such a rich reward, I want to appreciate the experience that preceded it.

I feel like, with the new potential for overload in e-books, I could get caught up in too much availability and stop appreciating the interactions, the journey, and, eventually, the prize gained. If I can so easily read anything at any time, how can I appreciate any of it at all?

Like anything in the world, the e-reader offers society both negatives and positives. The positives? No longer will we have to take the time out of our day to stalk down the nearest newspaper stand, drive to the local bookstore for the latest bestseller, or even pay increasingly high prices for our favorite books. However, all of these pros are cons as well. By using the e-reader, the newspaper printing companies will slowly begin to decrease in number, bookstores will lose popularity as people begin to simply purchase their books at the online Kindle store, and perhaps even some of our favorite authors won't have jobs if all book prices become standardized and they begin to make less money--as if authors can afford to be paid less in general.

E-readers are capable of so many things, but I can't necessarily say that I'm a fan. Yes, I can see their uses--they can be very handy at times--but in the long run e-readers can only serve to harm us. The what-ifs of e-readers are endless. I agree wholeheartedly with Jonas: as we progress further into the technological era, will technology begin to define us? As it stands now, we already have to worry about what computer or cell phone we have. However, I think the future problem of the e-reader extends beyond this. What if society became so dependent on e-readers that we really felt no need to care for our books? Would books or newspapers written long ago be left to simply gather dust and then literally begin to fall apart at the merest touch of the finger? Would society just have copies of all of these great literary pieces on their e-readers, or any sort of technology in general? Then again, formats change. For example, ten years ago people were still using floppy discs, a feature that is not generally offered with new computers today. If e-reader formats were to alter in the same way, there is no way we can be sure that all books, especially those written by lesser known authors, will also be changed to fit the new format of the improved e-reader. And if one day the world experienced such a drastic catastrophe that all technology was lost? We would lose everything, and there might not be any way to attain them again. In one day, cultures would lose everything that defined them, that helped to create who they are and who they once were as a people.

So yes, although the e-reader would present many new technological advances to the world, I think that we would be better off with books that we can hold in our hands, flip through the pages with the flick of a finger rather than a touch on the screen, and have the general knowledge that books will be around for a much longer time.

Uncanny

This relates to the comment I left yesterday on Jonas's post.

I was recently fiddling around in UT's computer lab using an illustrator application. I was trying to draw an e-reader that had all the qualities that people have been wanting-- ability to reproduce for loaning, water-proof, durable, biodegradable-- I was trying to draw what this could look like. It occured to me then that holy crap we just want these things to be human. (Think about it, like what Terra was writing on in "Consequential" and Schaberg commented on-- we want hard plastics to compost in "human" scale... like a human. And what Jeffrey said about loaning works, that sort of reproduction is like pregnancy and offspring).

And so, after looking up the the Turing Test (thanks poprockpolitics!) I have to agree with this notion that digital media and technology is trending towards more human-like qualities. But that is just the flip side to the coin. Jonas is right too I think. As we travel is this digital age, aren't computers and technology cognitively defining us? I am not the first person who has thought this. Last semester, a class mate, Keaton, threw out this idea when we were reading Phillip K. Dick. This author definitely understood the idea of the humans and computers slowing approaching eachother along their spectrums and eventually merging.

Of course the second technology gets too human, we again have a problem.

Consequential

I think it has occurred to most of us, though it probably made us all groan for one reason or another-- but one thing I do want to bring up are the obvious environmental implications of the mass-production of this technology.
Books are biodegradable. We cringe at the thought of our favorite book rotting slowly in the ground, but at least it can. The hard plastic of an e-reader should not be a deterrent just for nostalgic reasons, but also for the fact that we as a global society are in no place to waste as wildly and irresponsibly as we have in the past. We can no longer even pretend that we could have ever afforded to, much less continue to.
It seems like something that should go without saying, but here it is: we as a the nation of greed need to reflect upon whether we can continue to mass-produce plastic products that cause increasing strain on the world in which we live.
Already the Kindle has gone through three generations and I don't operate under the illusion that that number will stay small. Just look at the evolution and staggering figures of different cell phones, computers, portable music devices, ink cartidges, and game consoles we've gone through in the past fifty years. Before committing to a shift from paper publications to plastic ones, consider the consequences from all angles.

Hard Evidence

that even people with kindles find the electronic versions of their favorite books unsatisfactory: this right here is a study which found that after the distribution of free ebooks online, there was a temporary increase in the sales of the corresponding physical book. Which I find totally understandable; I can see myself reading an ebook and thinking "hey, this is really cool, I want a copy on my shelf." I know not all people feel this way, though. My brother's been a hardcore new media fan for years, and he's currently reading Dickens from his cell phone. While it's totally possible to go completely new media, I feel like old media, in this case, is at least going to put up a fight, much more than did journalism or snail mail.

I hope I don't miss books.

I feel I must preface this by stating that I am not a total Luddite and can recognize the benefit that is possible in technology like e-readers. I fear, however, the loss of an experience by the constant advancement of higher technology into our lower technologies.
It is particularly strange to me given that when I was in high school I had to do research exclusively in - gasp - books when writing a paper. During my high school years the internet began to gain more of a following and use but we had only just begun using email. The internet for better or for worse was not a tool for education when I was younger. It is strange to me even now while reading a book to be able to access Google simultaneously on my computer and get background and biographical information, translations, definitions, critical essays, and literary analysis just by typing in the title as a search term. I can only imagine how this instant search-ability will develop in e-reading. I don't know if they can do this now but I foresee interactive text with the ability to tap and define words. There is a possibility in wifi enabled devices like the ipad to provide footnotes that take the reader to the original source material they cite. It would be incredible to be able to translate a text simply by the push of a button. The possibilities, as they say, are endless.
But what is the cost in human experience? There is something personal and treasured about opening up a well worn copy of your favorite book. I don't think powering up the e-reader to find your oldest download will compare. Also, I cannot tell you how many times someone has loaned or gifted me a book. How impersonal to receive an email containing a gift credit at Amazon.com instead of a heartfelt and thought through gift of a book. Let's say I read an e-book that I really like. Let's say it is a Metallica biography that I wanted to give to my friend (sorry if Napster is before your time). Will e-books allow me to loan it to them? Will they only have a limited time to read it? How will this work? This brings me to the final troubling aspect that I've been thinking e-readers have. Books are absolutely portable. Probably the most portable medium we have. They require no equipment to enjoy them. No batteries, no TV, no headphones. I have, as I'm sure many of you have, often taken my book and a blanket and sat in a park for hours reading. Or stuck a small paperback in my pocket to read on the bus. Or brought a book camping. E-reading takes reading and grounds it. You must plug in, at least occasionally, to READ A BOOK. That seems to me incongruous with the nature of books. Books are by their nature infinitely portable and transferable. E-books are limited in both of these qualities.
I am fascinated by e-reading and the possibilities and innovations it may entail. I look forward to our further exploration of this burgeoning media. However, for the time being I am choosing to keep a healthy skepticism about it. I miss getting letters in the mail. I hope I don't end up missing dog-eared paperbacks.

Plastic Tomes

I’ve been thinking a lot about the e-reader since I first heard the presentation for the class, and a couple things keep bubbling up in my mind as I dwell on e-books. I honestly hardly ever gave them a second though before, but now I get weirdly excited about them. There is something amazing about the promise of the dissemination of knowledge that electronics like the Kindle possess; if they can make laptops that are less than $200, imagine if cheap Kindles were made available across the world to children and adults filled with the great books. What would that mean for literacy? Not having to buy 5 or 6 text books for a single student would certainly go a long way towards making education affordable for schools. I also have to catch myself when I think the internet is worldwide. It has the potential to be, sure, but it is by no means worldwide yet. Couldn’t the Kindle be the bridge, a sort of temporary replacement for the internet? Of course, that assumes they become far cheaper than they currently are. But, still. Potential.

However, I try to imagine myself reading one and honestly I have trouble. Just as I hate reading books on the Gutenberg Project, I can’t imagine reading War and Peace or Infinite Jest on an iPad. Nor can I see myself furiously studying for a test from a small screen. There is no physical last page to turn, so where is the sense of accomplishment when you finish a 10 pound behemoth? But then, doesn’t that reduce the worth of the writing if you tie the physicality of the book to it? It makes me question just how valuable the paper book is, and I simply can’t think of a logical reason for my obsession with having a two story library packed to the brim with gilt leather-bound books, especially compared to that entire collection in the palm of my hand.

Just some stuff I’ve been tossing around.
-Andrew

e-reader envisionings

Are we overlooking the physical implications of an e-reader?

Already as it is, tooling around on a laptop all the time has given me unmistakable "computer-posture." The neck jutting forward, the head out of alignment with the rest of the spine. This mal-aligned posture is just one symptom of the (literal) forward-thinking of contemporary culture. We are so enamoured with what is in front of our faces (T.V.'s, laptops, ipods and mp3s, e-readers...) that it seems as if we have forgotten the rest of our body in the jump into the digital.

I want an e-reader that has extendable arms that fold out from the main frame. They delicately reach out and wrap around the base of my skull. Every so often the device gently reminds me to breath deeply, re-align, and rest my eyes. I am not sure yet if my e-reader will have a robotic or human voice.

Also, I think e-readers should come in different colors.

I Pad

I have it from a veritable techie who always steers me correctly that there are some problems with the I Pad. He says it is not much more than a big, unwieldy I Pod and that there are serious interface problems. We should all wait until Apple fixes those problems to buy one. Eventually I Pad will be able to download from Amazon and will be more than a large I Pod, so be patient.

Reading... Technology

When I first heard of the Kindle, I was frankly appalled that the act of reading could become just another cash cow in the market of technology. I still have my doubts, but I must admit that the possibilities for reading technology are astounding and undeniable. There is no perfect device for reading, or anything really. However, the traditional book--though nostalgic-- is becoming increasingly outdated in our digital age. My opinion is that though books will probably not become totally obsolete in our time, the time has come for a reliable, flexible, useful digital publishing service/device that provides reading material in a way that combines the best aspects of both traditional novels and digital connectivity.
A book-like device that allows a reader to physically make their own notes by way of stylus (as they might in a paper text), a way to upload and save notes onto their computer, change the size of the page itself (such as the iPhone/iTouch), and (what seems to me to be the obvious and most important feature) a vast number of downloadable titles. A system like iTunes would be useful--where all the purchased texts are saved to a hard drive and can be switched out to save memory as well as a way to sort the texts by rating, genre, author, etc. I also think that owning a book and having the license to read are two very different things; any text that has been purchased should be considered the owner's property, without any unwanted interference from publishers after the book has been bought (such as removing texts, etc.). A digital library where texts can be "checked out" for certain periods of time would also be a lovely feature.
It's impossible for me to forgive any kind of reading technology for its shortcomings--hard plastic instead of paper, no musty used-book smell. But the oppurtunities presented by constantly-evolving reading technology are too great to be ignored, many and varied, endless even.

Future of the Book Industry

My opinion on the digital-vs.-traditional debate is that more variety is always good. What I think we’re looking at right now is the experimental phase of this development— we’ve just acquired the ability to do something completely different, and I think we’ll have to go through a period of “Look, look, I can make an e-reader do this!” before people will finally settle down and decide what, exactly, they want their reading devices to do. At which point I think we can expect to see a wide spectrum of options ranging from books, which will probably become something more akin to luxury commodities, similar to how fountain pens are today— this is good because it means leather binding and gold-leaf pages and dusty old bookshops run by a man with too many cats who doesn’t actually want to sell you anything— to some new evolution of the kindle that does everything you could possibly imagine. But the best option on the market will probably be some synthesis of the two mediums— maybe an object which is roughly the size and shape of a book, with pages that actually turn, but the paper is electronic and nearly indestructible, does not warp when it gets wet, and it interacts with you via a touchscreen embedded in every page. That would be my ideal scenario. What actually happens will probably be better.

My Kindle

Thanks for the invitation to blog with you guys. I was awake at 4 AM reading my kindle. I finished my book, and went to the kindle store and ordered another by the same author. What library is opened for that kind of service?
I now have almost 300 books on my new kindle. If either of you did not erase my books from the kindles I gave you, please feel free to read--most is trash, I am sorry to say.

Collect your Kindle-ing

So there's no question that Apple's "ipad" will be the sexiest e-reader to hit the market (notwithstanding its unfortunate product name), but there's still a strong something to be said for the product that sparked the... dare I say it... the "e-reading revolution": Amazon's Kindle.

Perhaps the Kindle does a appear a bit outdated. But perhaps this seemingly 'one trick pony' is exactly the device we need in our distracting digital world. One aspect of the traditional book that I'll always love is the way it forces me to focus on only one task: reading. (Ok, maybe two or three, if you separate "thinking" and "writing" from "reading," which I do not necessarily do.) In fact, while reading a mystery from Stieg Larsson on my Kindle, I found the keyboard a useless appendage--taking up precious space on the page. I suppose I still more quickly reach for pencil and paper than availing myself of the fairly primitive note-taking function of the Kindle. By extension, I wonder if I'll become dizzyingly overworked when I have beautiful graphics, crisp images and moving pictures, and the seemingly infinite resources of the web and all the apple apps at my finger tips w/ the ipad. What will reading become when we move from a single use, wood pulp book--and, yes, again, some such books have more than one use: I've used books to balance tables and act as tea cup coasters, after all!--to the all-in-one digital reader? (Why, for example, should the ipad necessarily still be classified as an electronic reader? Has it not already exploded that category?) Of course, I suppose the same questions can be asked as we moved from stone tablet to papyrus to vellum and animal skins to the wood pulp and recycled paper of today. What, finally, does it mean "to read"?

With these thoughts in mind, here's a small, random sampling amid the myriad books you can read on a Kindle--and, if you download the Kindle app, on your ipad, too--about the ups and downs of electronic (digital, hypertext, etc.) reading:

The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, Robert Darnton (2009)

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins (2008)

The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book), Sherman Young (2007)

From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts, Peter L. Shillingsburg (2006)

Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Jay David Bolter (2001)


Oddly, these are not available on the Kindle... but should be!

New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (2009)

Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, N. Katherine Hayles (2008)

My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, N. Katherine Hayles (2005)

Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet H. Murray (1998)


Please suggest additional titles under Comments for this post.

Theee iPad

For the explosion of e-readers, the iPad has been the device that everyone has been anxiously awaiting. Considering the future of reading and writing a little peak into that future was given by Penguin UK recently. And the future is looking pretty cool. Dare I say that the Kindle is already looking a bit old fashioned.

What this seminar will entail

This seminar will not:

Simply replace books with e-readers.

Play with a new technology for its own sake.




This seminar will:

Ask questions about how we read and how we write on new media devices.

Ask why use new technology to do something that is relatively low technology (i.e., read).

Ask how do technology, reading and writing interface to create who we are in the contemporary moment.

Alex, I'll take e-readers for $500.

Another e-reader that’s more than an e-reader. Made by Spring Design, the Alex has an e-ink display and an LCD display. On the smaller screen, you can surf the web, while reading Thomas Pynchon on the e-ink display (Oh wait. No Thomas Pynchon for the e-readers! Why not? If we’re gonna talk about techo-paranoia, let’s get Pynchon into the mix. Good thing we have DeLillo in e-ink.). Hell, you can even read and watch a movie at the same time. It’s just like studying for finals, except now you can do it anywhere.

This e-reader can do things that the Kindle and Nook can’t, but that iPad is looming on the horizon.