Certainly, as we turn to online reading, the physiology of the reading process itself shifts; we don’t read the same way online as we do on paper. Anne Mangen, a professor at the National Centre for Reading Education and Research at the University of Stavanger, in Norway, points out that reading is always an interaction between a person and a technology, be it a computer or an e-reader or even a bound book. Reading “involves factors not usually acknowledged,†she told me. “The ergonomics, the haptics of the device itself. The tangibility of paper versus the intangibility of something digital.†The contrast of pixels, the layout of the words, the concept of scrolling versus turning a page, the physicality of a book versus the ephemerality of a screen, the ability to hyperlink and move from source to source within seconds online—all these variables translate into a different reading experience.
Tag Archives: reading
The Decline of the American Book Lover
The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. As in, they hadn’t cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in the car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.
The Decline of the American Book Lover – Jordan Weissmann – The Atlantic.
The rise of e-reading (Pew Internet and American Life Project)
21% of Americans have read an e-book. The increasing availability of e-content is prompting some to read more than in the past and to prefer buying books to borrowing them.
E-books Can’t Burn by Tim Parks
Interviewed after winning England’s Costa Prize for Literature in late January, the distinguished novelist Andrew Miller remarked that while he assumed that soon most popular fiction would be read on screen, he believed and hoped that literary fiction would continue to be read on paper. In his Man Booker Prize acceptance speech last October, Julian Barnes made his own plea for the survival of printed books. Jonathan Franzen has also declared himself of the same faith. At the university where I work, certain professors, old and young, will react with disapproval at the notion that one is reading poetry on a Kindle. It is sacrilege.
E-books Can’t Burn by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.
Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins – NYTimes.com
Marginalia, “regarded as a tool of literary archaeology…has an uncertain fate in a digitalized world”
Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins – NYTimes.com.