Another skeptic comes to e-reading

This morning I stumbled across a lengthy essay in The Morning News in which writer Alexander Chee recounts how he happened to get started in e-reading. It began with 22 boxes of paper books that he moved into his partner Dustin’s one-bedroom apartment when they began living together. These were books he had accreted over the course of his life, and they overfilled more than 70 feet of bookshelves.

Looking at all these shelves, and realizing he just didn’t have room for many more books, Chee decided it was time to get over his skepticism and consider the e-book. Even though he reflected that the Kindle had improved its aesthetics enough to be worth considering, he still wasn’t quite comfortable with it, so he decided to start out by reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea on a Kindle app on his phone. What happened next, I find kind of endearing:

I opened it on my next subway ride downtown. It began with approximately two paragraphs of the book, lit up on the screen of my phone. I tapped the side of the screen and it flew to the next three paragraphs, and so on. A few minutes passed and I observed that I was reading peacefully. It was both an entirely new reading experience, like I had a secret that fit inside the palm of my hand, but it was also familiar: In the fifth grade I was taught to speed-read on a machine that projected sentences onto a wall at high speeds, sentences in the white box of a screen, flashing in a dark room.

Moments later, I got off the train. That went well, I decided, and slid my phone back into my pocket. And then I drew it back out, turned the app on, and kept reading as I walked, something I taught myself to do as a child when I lacked the patience to put a book down in order to walk to school.

Chee spends a large chunk of the rest of the essay talking about his addiction to reading Internet news sites—an addiction he suggests was born out of his nervousness with the political situation over the last few years. He kept checking sites nervously, as if knowing what was going on would help him put up a defense against it. And all that news reading had taken away his time and desire to read novels, as with Nicholas Carr whose book on the Internet and attention spans (that I discussed here) he cites.

But Chee found that his “phone-sized e-reader that sometimes took calls”—and, later, the iPad he purchased for larger-form e-reading—helped him to break that habit, reacquainting him with novels and making it easier for him to read in long form again. It soothed away some of that nervousness that had kept him obsessively checking the news. And by getting him in the reading frame of mind, it even caused him to venture into reading one of his print books that he hadn’t quite gotten around to before.

In the end, Chee says, there are still “ponderables” regarding the e-book—even though he’s read printed books in poor light for decades without eyestrain, he finds that iPad reading can give him headaches ”in ways reading on paper never did.” He is a little nervous about the possibility of e-books “killing bookstores”, but also notes that the book has always been a “delivery system” and a lot of the good things about books will still be good no matter what format it’s in. And there will always be some books he wants as physical artifacts. But on the other hand, e-readers let him get more books of any kind without adding more clutter.

Apart from being the story of a skeptic coming to e-books, which I always enjoy (funny how there have been so many of them lately), I found this essay an interesting glimpse into the mind of a writer. I hope he finds that e-reading on his iPad and his phone continue to enthrall him just as much in the future.

For myself, I find I miss having an iPod Touch for just that very reason. It was easy, on my Touch, to whip out the device and read wherever I was. Not so much on the iPad.