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By Chris Meadows

Emma Silvers's reading device of choice Here we have yet another story on why print rules and e-books drool, by 26-year-old Emma Silvers who posits the thesis that she is somehow nobly fighting against the tide of her generation, rejecting conformity and marching to the beat of a different drummer and all that. It ends up coming across as smug and smacks more than a little of entitlement.

Silvers writes of encountering a woman reading a book on the Kindle and being annoyed because instead of seeing a book cover to give away what the person was reading, she saw the “smooth metallic back of the thing.”

As I stared at the woman, fully engaged, happily using this very practical and very expensive device that, for all I know, she saved her pennies for a year to buy, I felt something entirely out of proportion with the situation: I felt personally slighted.

At least she admits that her feelings were “ridiculous” and out of proportion, and then goes on to analyze why she feels what she feels. She actually goes all the way back to her childhood and discusses how she taught herself to read by annoying her older sister, read in the car on family vacations to the point of motion sickness, and has been known to walk into trees and lampposts while reading on the street (I’ll admit, I’ve been there).

She touches on Nicholas Carr’s article about what the Internet is doing to our attention span (which I covered here) and notes that all the social networking and Internet-related features of the Kindle are exactly the kind of distractions she doesn’t want to take her out of the immersive reading experience she treasures. She writes that the multitude of musical choice offered by her iPod means she rarely listens to albums all the way through anymore, and adds:

Out of every argument I’ve heard in favor of e-readers — no dead trees, portable research, "it’s the future," etc. — my least favorite might be the central point of the thing: the fact that it allows you to choose from thousands of books at any given time. I simply don’t want that kind of potential for distraction. Would I have ever made it through any book by Herman Hesse if I’d had the choice, with a press of a button, to lighten the mood with a little Tom Robbins? Will anyone ever finish "Infinite Jest" on a device that constantly presents other options?

She does admit in closing what seems obvious to the rest of us: her disdain for e-books is at least partly rooted in her nostalgia for the reading experiences she had growing up, and a sadness that kids of future generations aren’t going to have those same experiences.

There are so many things wrong with this article that it’s hard to figure out where to start. First of all, what God-given right does Ms. Silver have to know what everyone else around her is reading? (See also our coverage of Coverspy on a related issue.) The only reason she’s gotten to see it in the past is that book covers are endemic to the paper book format, but you could also very well consider them a violation of privacy. (A bit ironic that every potential privacy violation by Google, Facebook, or LiveJournal hits the news immediately, but here’s this woman railing against something technology does that increases privacy.)

What if that reader had equipped her paper book with a jacket made from brown paper? (I recall using those as protection for school textbooks, but they could just as easily be used for protecting your choice of reading matter from prying eyes.) Would she still feel annoyed if she knew keeping the title secret was an intentional act on the part of the reader rather than incidental? Or would she feel even more aggravated at the “intentional snub”?

Indeed, one of the reasons erotic romance e-books have been huge sellers ever since the Palm Pilot days is that there’s no need to feel embarrassed about being seen reading that kind of book anymore. (And lest we forget, J.K. Rowling’s UK publisher famously came out with “ugly cover” editions of all the Harry Potter books so adults could read them without embarrassment on the train.)

As for her argument about distractions, even leaving aside the fact that Carr’s stance on the distraction of multitasking is the subject of some debate, I guess Ms. Silver never reads anything in libraries? Or indeed, anywhere there is a stocked bookshelf?

It’s not as if printed books cuff themselves to your hand and put blinders on you until you finish reading them. You can always choose to close the book you’re reading (and optionally throw it at the wall, if the spirit moves you) and pick up another. Unless Ms. Silver does all her reading on the train, or is too lazy to get up and go to a bookshelf, she can quite often choose “to lighten the mood [of a Herman Hesse book] with a little Tom Robbins" or otherwise stop reading her current book in favor of another.

Why doesn’t she? It can’t be that going to a bookshelf is soooo much harder than pushing a button. It’s not like it would take very many more calories. The fact is, concentration is an act of will. If you want to read one book all the way through, nobody is stopping you but you. Even leaving aside the availability of other books, there are just as many distractions in the real world (“Pardon me, I couldn’t help noticing that you’re reading the latest Twilight book. How is it?”) as in the virtual one, and unlike those you don’t always have control over the real-world ones (unless you’re less afraid than most people to growl, “Leave me alone, I’m reading.”).

And if Ms. Silver is so concerned about the possibility of lacking the willpower to keep always-on Internetly things from distracting her, she could always choose one of the wi-fi only models, like the Wi-Fi Kindle or the iPod Touch, or even one of the e-readers (such as most models from Sony) that have no Internet connectivity at all. Then she could choose to put as few or as many books on it at a time as she wants.

Moving on, her sadness that other kids won’t have the same reading experiences as she did growing up seems a bit self-centered to me, as though she’s not admitting the validity of the childhood experiences of kids (or those few of them who still read at all, anyway) who can get fully-immersed into e-books without problems.

I’ve been reading e-books for something like 13 years now (longer if you count the Superguy stuff I read off a monitor) and can probably count the books I was unable to finish on the fingers of one hand. And if I was unable to finish them, it was not because they were e-books, but because I just didn’t like them.

There isn’t some kind of evil distracting radiation emanating from these devices; if you can focus on them, the reading experience can be every bit as ludic as any printed book. I have very little doubt that twenty years from now, someone as old as Emma Silvers is now will feel every bit as nostalgic for the Kindle, “back in the good ol’ days when it was still black and white” as she does for paper books.

And finally, the idea that e-book readers are predominantly an aspect of youth culture misses the boat considerably. There are a lot of older readers of e-books, given that e-books allow any title to be made into a “large print edition”. I’ve been reading e-books since I was younger than Silver is now, and don’t plan on stopping. Heck, TeleRead’s founder David Rothman is in his sixties.

Anyway, this is another example of someone presenting his own opinion as the right way to do things. (And to be fair, I suppose this response is, too.) But now that e-books are becoming popular enough to challenge print’s primacy, we’re just going to have to get used to reading and rebutting these posts when we find them.

 
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