Reading in the Digital Age
“In bringing the ancient and medieval worlds into fusion – or, as some would say, confusion – the printed book created a third world, the modern world, which now encounters a new electric technology or a new extension of man”.
- Media scholar Marshall McLuhan
The invention of the printing press in 1455 presented a major advancement in the dissemination of knowledge. Ever since the printing press made books cheaply and widely available, the book has been the best way to read. With the new technology of the press, books could now be reproduced and read widely by an educated audience, enabling the spread of ideas at an unprecedented rate. Just as the printing press revolutionized the intellectual landscape of the world, the advent of the computer age has lead many to predict that electronic books will introduce a new age of literacy. Electronic devices offer many conveniences not available on paper. Electronic files can be downloaded for a fraction of the cost of a regular book. Electronic files can be automatically searched, indexed, and catalogued, and can even be read to you by your computer. But despite the advances of computers and other electronic reading devices, books remain the preferred way to experience text. Why is this? Despite their power, computers make poor reading devices because computer designers have failed to understand how the physical construction of the book makes it easier and more enjoyable to read.
Books remain the preferred way to read because of a variety of factors that make them the best way to read, understanding, and share text. Books engage senses other than just sight. Touch and smell convey important information about a book. It is said that you should not judge a book by its cover, but the physical experience of a book – its size, covers design, and typography prepares you to receive certain information from the contents of the book. A collection of 16th-century Spanish love poems is, and should be, presented in a different way than an introduction to web programming. But with an electronic reading device, all text, whether it is a collection of love poems or an introduction to programming, is reduced to a simple string of monospaced text on a glowing screen. When we reduce books to a common file format, we make files easy to handle and display by the computer, but we lose the embossed leather cover which distinguishes the poetry from the programming.
The book has many features that seem commonplace, but combine to make the book a powerful tool for reading, understanding, and sharing text. This is because there is a standard, intuitive way to experience a book. No matter who the publisher is, anyone can pick up a book and begin reading because of these publishing conventions. Books are all arranged in the same way – you move from a title to table of contents, to the content. If you need reference, there will be a bibliography, appendix, or index at the back. Moving through books is intuitive – just turn the page. Referring to multiple pages is easy – mark them with your fingers.
The design of a book makes it easy to share information with others. Books can be loaned, passed among multiple readers. It is very easy to add marks or annotations to the margins. In contrast to this flexibility, computers have only basic tools for interacting directly with the text. Because the only input available on a computer is a mouse and keyboard, there is a limit on the range of expression that is normally used to communicate an idea – underlining, highlighting, and arrows. This limit makes it harder to communicate ideas with a computer than with a book.
Recently, a number of electronic devices have attempted to mimic the experience of reading a book. These devices may be an ordinary desktop computer, or a specialized reading device. These specialized reading devices, like the Amazon Kindle, are shaped like a paperback book but have an electronic display and keyboard. The manufacturers of these devices have often tried to make reading from an electronic device more like reading from a book by building better screens. Traditional liquid crystal displays, the kind in your computer, are hard on the eyes because they use a backlight to project images to your eyes. This is a very different experience than viewing a paper page, which is much gentler on the eyes. This ergonomic difference means that while many people can read a book for hours, they cannot look at a computer screen nearly as long. While this is part of the issue, it does not address the underlying differences in the way people read books and use computers.
The underlying problem is that the unity of experience in reading a book is not present in reading electronic devices. While reading on a computer, you must deal not only with publishing conventions, but device conventions. Because these devices use a variety of systems to display and manipulate text, they rely on a variety of standards to control how that is achieved. This means that there is no consistency in experience between different devices. On a Kindle, you might press a button to move forward in the text, while a competing device might require a swipe of the finger. The variety of devices and interfaces mean that you will have to learn many different interfaces to navigate around the text.
The process of relearning how to move through a book distracts us from the act of reading and understanding the text and makes reading on a computer less enjoyable and productive than reading a book. Famed designer Alan Cooper calls this problem cognitive friction - "In the information age, as computers invade our lives and more and more products contain a chip of silicon, we find that what lies between us humans and our devices is cognitive friction, which is something new and something that we are ill-prepared to deal with. Our engineering skills are highly refined, but when we apply them to a cognitive friction problem, they fail to solve it" (Cooper 92). Computers have many design issues to overcome before they can completely replace books. Books are small and reliable. Even if they have been sitting on a library shelf for the last 50 years, you will still be able to open and read any book. The complexity that lets computers complete a variety of tasks makes them more vulnerable to a variety of problems. Computers, and the software that runs them, is unintuitive and unreliable – just imagine if your books crashed as frequently as your computer. Until electronic reading devices can mach the speed and reliability of the printed book, we will prefer reading on paper to reading on a screen.
The manner in which we read will not be the only change. There will also be much more to read. Deciding what to read, and choosing among the possibilities offered to us, will present a major challenge to the future reader. According to industry magazine Publishers Weekly, there were about 300,000 new books published in 2008 alone (Publishers Weekly 2008). This is an enormous amount of text, and does not include the vast amount of print material that is not published as a book – magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets. This deluge of content means many people may have a difficult time finding books to read among the thousands published. Electronic recommendation systems currently used in systems such as the Netflix movie algorithm might be applied to published works, helping readers find material based on their likes and dislikes.
The computer offers us an opportunity to improve the way we read and process information. I believe that computers will only replace paper books when they incorporate the commonplace but important features that make books such powerful and useful tools for displaying and working with text. By combining the best aspects of computers and physical books, the future of reading is one where we can read, understand and share text more effectively and enjoyably.
Sources Cited:
Alan, Cooper. The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Indianapolis, IN: Sams, 1999. Print.
Marshall, McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko, 2003. Print.
Sellen, Abigail J., and Richard H. R. Harper. The Myth of the Paperless Office. New York: The MIT, 2001. Print.
Zaid, Gabriel. So Many Books. New York: Sort of Books, 2004. Print.
Nelson, Sarah. “Bearing the Bad News”. Publishers Weekly March 2008. http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6544014.html