Changing How We Read

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha, I’m still chewing over the series of articles published in the LA Times about reading.

Did you see those?

Oh, I sure did. Now, where did you read them?

I read them online on my LCD screen on my computer, and that’s kind of what I’m thinking about here.

One of the articles talked at length about e-readers, things like the iPad or the Amazon Kindle.

Or even your cell phone being used to read text, not just books, but newspaper or anything that traditionally might come on paper, right?

If there was one thing that was clear from these articles in the LA Times, it wasn’t that we’re reading less.

We’re not. We’re reading more.

Absolutely.

We may be reading a little less fiction or a little less of the books that the publishers want us to read, books that they purport to be sophisticated and intelligent.

We have our own opinions, right?

We are reading more than we used to per person. Absolutely.

But that’s not going to stop, right?

So we actually need more ways to read our text in more convenient ways.

And I don’t think that a several hundred dollar device is the end of that chain of logic.

Oh, I think you’re right.

The thing that really struck me reading this story in the L.A. Times about the future of reading was I just feel like we’re, I mean, compared to video games, I think we’re at the Pong stage.

Yes, that’s exactly it.

Like the iPad does this page curl thing in the corner when you buy a book.

It does this video or this screen representation of what might actually happen with a real book where the page turns over a little bit and there’s the shadow and the curve and it looks like a bent corner.

And, you know, that’s websites.

In 1994, we’re doing this thing where they made it look like your office.

And if you clicked on the desk, you saw your files.

And if you clicked on the picture frame, you saw your photos.

And we’re long past thinking that kind of metaphor is necessary.

And yet the e-book readers seem somehow to be primitive in a way and not even reaching far enough, right?

But maybe I’m just impatient.

I expect them to stay ahead of my intentions.

Yeah, I mean, I can see projecting this stuff on the inside of your eyeglasses at some point.

Imagine this.

You open up your wallet and you’ve got your credit cards in there and business cards and bits of scrap paper and receipts and stuff.

But one of those is something that’s about as big as a credit card and about as thick.

And this is your e-book reader.

It’s flexible.

It’s almost disposable.

It’s like the cheap digital cameras that you can dial by at the drugstore.

They’re like $9, you know.

It’s something like that.

It’s not this incredibly expensive device.

We want to get to the point where e-readers, whether you’re reading newspapers or books, are so inexpensive that you don’t have to talk to your spouse about the purchase.

Oh, my gosh.

And we’re not there yet.

Oh, my gosh.

But we are in the middle of a revolution.

And what we’re looking at is Pong and Space Invaders right now.

I mean, the other thing that this article mentioned that necessarily comes to mind is how this is going to change not the medium, but the way we read and the way our brains work.

You know, there was a former chairman of the NEA who was quoted in that article as saying, reading well is like playing the piano or the violin.

You know, it’s a high-level cognitive ability, and it requires practice and skill.

And, you know, I do have concerns about that, but I also agree with the person in the article who said, look, the train’s left the station.

And there’s no evidence that the new kinds of reading that we’re doing are worse than the old kinds.

That’s the clincher here for me.

Well, do you think that people will be sitting there reading War and Peace on their cell phones?

I mean, I’m astonished at how much I read on my cell phone now.

Out of the last hundred books that I’ve read, probably more than 80% were read on my phone.

Really?

Absolutely.

Like fiction?

Fiction, nonfiction, technical manuals.

And it’s so much easier than looking for the book, right?

I mean, this is a thing that you have in your pocket all the time.

I should say, to close this all out, there was a lovely article, a funny article posted on McSweeney’s, you know, the literary blog that’s been around forever.

Right.

It joked that a group of engineers had tested all the e-readers and found that the newspaper was the best one on the market.

And by the newspaper, they meant the real newspaper.

And it was great.

Ease of use.

Ease of use and, yeah, all the good things about it.

What does the future of reading mean to you?

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send your thoughts at length in email to words@waywordradio.org.