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By C. A. Bridges

C. A. Bridges, a new contributor, is a newspaper writer and a veteran e-book-reader—his bio appears at the end. Welcome, C.A.! – D.R.

image Readers of e-books already know this tune. Asked about reading text files on a handheld device, defenders of print proclaim their love for the printed word, the feel of the paper, the experience of holding, owning and reading a physical book, with the sometimes not-so-subtle implication that anyone settling for a text file is somehow less of a reader.

This week, as I was wondering what to write about first for TeleRead, my own newspaper helped me out with just such an opinion from an interview with Catherine Golden, a professor of English at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and author of several books including Posting It—The Victorian Revolution in Writing. In the interview, a companion piece to an article about bringing down costs of college textbooks, she offers her opinion of e-books in general.

“While I am aware that people—including my college-age sons—increasingly read a lot of textual material on-screen,” she said, “as a scholar, I savor the physical book.

“Books matter to me, and I would be willing to forego other things to buy a printed version of a book. I care about book jackets, the quality and placement of the illustrations, and the look of the typeface on a page. While I am comfortable reading short texts on-screen, I like to underline words, write in the margins of a book, and keep a record of important scenes and quotations in the back pages of a book, particularly one I am using for teaching. I teach with printed books and like my students to bring their books to class and to do close readings of Victorian texts and illustrations central to long multi-plot novels like Vanity Fair or David Copperfield.

She emphasizes “as a scholar” several times, and there seems to be some conflation of “online books” and “e-books,” but overall this is a fair description of the appeal of printed books for many people, myself included.

A physical book is something beyond just the words between the covers; it’s the setting for a reading experience. Just the act of settling down into an overstuffed armchair with a big book and a hot drink can instantly put you into the mood for sinking into someone else’s world for a little while. A physical book is something you can take pleasure in, just seeing it on your shelf. There’s a triumphant joy in finding a book you’ve been hunting for years, buried in the stacks of a musty used bookstore. You can loan a physical book to friends, donate it to a library for others to enjoy, have it signed by the author, and pass it down to your children as a treasured heirloom. And I can appreciate, as a scholar, the physical impact an original work can have on someone studying the book in the context of the times in which it was written.

Thing is, as a reader? I don’t always care as much.

Sometimes—most times—I just want to read the story. I’m not especially interested in the format and I don’t require the additional stagecraft to get me in the mood. Most of my reading is not actually performed curled up in a chair or sitting comfortably at a desk. I want books that come with me wherever I go.

As an example, with all the publicity over the new “Sherlock Holmes” movie these past few weeks I became interested in revisiting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories about the intrepid detective. And, as it happens, I possess a leather-bound copy of the complete works, given to me by a friend as a gift some 25 years ago. It’s a handsome volume which contains not only the original illustrations from The Strand Magazine by Sidney Paget but the somewhat more obscure illustrations by George Hutchinson for A Study in Scarlet and the illustrations to The Sign of the Four by Frank H. Townshend. The text is presented in double rows, much like the original presentation.

It’s still on my shelf, looking handsome. Instead, while we were in a restaurant after seeing the movie, I downloaded the text of the stories onto my iPod Touch, where I do the bulk of my reading these days. It never occurred to me to wait until I got home and could dig out the printed copy. And yet somehow, despite the lack of paper under my fingers or the smell of old glue in my nose, I had no problem at all losing myself in Holmes’ world.

image As a reader, I want reading to be as convenient for me as possible. I want dozens, hundreds of books with me at all times, with thousands more ready at a moment’s notice. I want to keep a fictional gateway near me at all times for me to step through whenever I have a few uninterrupted minutes, whether it’s my lunch hour or in a doctor’s office or on a bus or stuck in traffic.

Like Professor Golden I also make notes and annotations, and some e-book readers even allow those to be exported. Books open precisely where I left off, no matter how many I am currently reading. I can adjust text size, font, backlighting and color for easier reading in different environments. I can easily search for text, a task that’s a bit trickier in, say, my 808-page, 12-lb Sherlock Holmes compendium. And I can slip the entire saga of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous creation into my shirt pocket.

Printed books are a treasure. I own thousands, on my shelves and in storage. Many of them, like the Sherlock Holmes book, are also tangible memories of friends and old times. I’m not hoping that everyone adopts e-book reading or that print books should ever go away.

imageI just want scholars such as Professor Golden to know that reading without the trappings of print is still reading.

Bio: C. A. Bridges writes about pop culture and geeklove, both at his column “24/7″ at GO386.com and at his site BashingInMinds.com. He has been an e-book lover since he could first shovel them onto his Palm Pilot, back when they were still called Palm Pilots, which should tell you something right there.

 
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