Not Books, but Doors: Why eReading is a More Immersive Experience

I’ve been reading electronically — phone, desktop (I know), Kobo, Kobo Touch — for perhaps two years now, and I’ve come to the following conclusion as my reading habits have changed.

Electronic reading does a better job of engaging the reader’s imagination than print books do.

It’s also, of course, a more physically pleasurable experience:

• Lighter
• Easier to operate (I’m talking about turning pages, and believe me no one is a better one-handed print page-turner than I am)
• Less likely to wake you up when you drop it on your face when falling asleep reading
• Not going to bedazzle you with glare when reading in bright sunlight (seriously, reading a good e-ink display beside a pool is a world-class experience)

But all of those are ultimately secondary. What eReading is really, really good at is letting you be a creative reader. Reading is the act of imaginatively interpreting — reconstructing — the work of an another person’s imagination. That’s subject to two sets of constraints: the range and ability of the author to express their imagination; and the range and ability of the reader to interpret it, which is to say, to creatively reimagine it on their own terms. Technology is not a neutral factor in that relationship. And electronic readers do a better job of relaxing the second set of those constraints.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about my reading experience over the last couple dozen months.

1. I’m reading more.

Having a vast array of content to choose from means less reading time lost because I’m not quite in the mood for the book that I happened to bring with me. And that’s exactly the point: I can read according to my mood — not have to remember to bring a book strong enough to change my mood. Every time.

So, I’m better read — but also have the ability to start reading something on a spur-of-the-moment suggestion. If I’m at a party and someone says, look, you have to read The Poisonwood Bible, I can start reading it on the bus on the way home instead of the Pretty Little Liars #9 that I was reading on the way there. This possibility, alone, makes me feel better read, because it’s always within reach. The horizons of my imagination feel broader. (It doesn’t hurt that the prices are usually lower.)

2. I’m far less tolerant of poorly written non-fiction.

Perhaps that’s not quite fair: I’m far less tolerant of non-fiction that is written without a distinctive voice, or at the very least some concession to narrative structure. For all the improvements of scrolling and progress indicators, it remains much easier to skim a print book than an eBook. Which means I have to page through the eBook… and if it’s boring I’d just as soon move onto something else. But on an eReader, the abandoned books aren’t staring me in the face in some strange transfiguration of guilt and anxiety. In short: I’m in control of the reading experience — unless the author is really, really good; unless they are actively contributing towards the mutual creative act.

Hannah from Pretty Little Liars

Theodore Dreiser

Perhaps we do lose something in that. “Great books don’t promise to hold your attention,” I remember an English professor once telling a class utterly bored by one of the masters of American literature (probably Dreiser), “but they do promise to reward it.” I suspect that, in a future when electronic reading is the dominant manner of reading, authors who can’t write well will not be able to release ideas slowly. (And if we don’t read Dreiser, we’ll all miss out on some of the more amusing fender-benders of American prose.)

On the other hand:

3. I can concentrate better

Somehow the flexibility of the form — yes, the font size, the typeface selection — means that I can get better terms in the reading relationship. I can take my glasses off but still read without having to hold the device a couple of inches from my face. It’s less about the conditions that I must arrange in order to read, and more about how I can manipulate the content to suit me.

4. I don’t feel like I’m carrying a book around

Because I’m not. I’m not carrying hundreds of books either. At a certain point, having more books than I could list made my device something less like a book, or a compendium, than a portal: a door. That was one of the thrilling discoveries of the first Kobo reader: it came pre-loaded with a hundred free books, which made it clear that this technology was not simply a more efficient distribution mechanism, but a gateway to limitless content. Wi-fi devices have absolutely helped with that too — but they have kept the connection to the wider Internet obscure enough that I’m not prone to jump on Twitter or the web. Reading remains immersive, yet feels connected.

5. The books I have read feel closer to one another

And that sense of connection, crucially, extends to the books I have already read. Somehow the ability to have the complete works (well, not quite yet) of Faulkner, Didion, Murakami, and John McPhee in my bag, at all times, gives me a more holistic sense of my reading life than having them marooned, out of reach, on a bookshelf, where their valences are confined to the sequence in which I happen to have them shelved. The connections between these books are multiple and they continually expand as I — by the sheer act of reading — add to their company. Virtual shelves aren’t the same as real shelves, and the books I have on my Kobo live in the same kind of unregulated relationships to one another than they do in my imagination.

John McPhee: The Non-Portable Version

By amalgamating possibility, your aggregate reading experience, the range of your reading and your interests, electronic readers offer a sort of physical external representation of your imagination. They are a sort of auxiliary imagination. My Kobo Touch, after only a few weeks, houses hundreds of books and hundreds of annotations and highlights; it has measured and marked my progress through novels and essays (and, yes, I earned the insomniac badges along the way). It hasn’t just been a device: it’s been a companion.

Reading merges the content of the page with everything else you have ever read, through the filter of your imagination. It is a cumulative, messy process: it disintegrates the boundaries between ideas, times, places, people, events. It is a process of unseaming the constraints of reality; of unspooling it into the collective and personal reaches of the imagination. And the eReading device is by definition a much better metaphor for that process than physical books. Ideas collide, aggregate, pile into one another. They are sunk within you. They do not remain distinct.

Perhaps this is how the listeners to epic poetry once felt, as the stories that are now The Iliad and The Odyssey were released into the collective ether. Perhaps physical books were a transitional media.

So that’s where I’m at. Admittedly other things have conspired to bring me there. I’m not at a point in my life where I still strongly feel the need to display my books around me as an expression of my refinement and taste, and in any event it’s rare that a book changes me in the way of a Slouching Towards Bethlehem or Light in August: my imagination is more robust than it was when I was 21, and I’ve already discovered many of the books most likely to change me. What’s more, the limitations of urban living have somewhat necessarily curtailed my ability to endlessly collect books.

But still: I’ve fallen out of love with shelves of trade paperbacks, and back in love with something that feels closer to the experience of reading itself.

Reading a physical book still retains its pleasures: there is absolutely something thrilling about a gorgeous hardcover, something that feels like a communion close to the author’s intent. But that’s exactly the point: physical books make you read on the author’s terms; reading electronically takes place more on the reader’s terms. I think that’s a good thing. It makes reading more personal, more democratic, more controversial.

But it’s a huge change — and it could be a generation before authors catch up to it.

Buzzed

A couple of us have been using the newly enable Google Buzz feature in Gmail. What’s Buzz? It’s kind of hard to explain.

Just a little off (to) the side (of gmail)

Got it? Alright.

I love that my non-twittering friends are now not only privy to my tweets (a dubious privilege, indeed) but able to respond at length without having to join Twitter themselves.

Not only this: they’re now able to converse with one another in the course of commenting. This is gold. When they said Buzz was like writing a message without a “To:” I wondered initially how that was different from Twitter or a Facebook update. I get it now.

With Buzz I can do what I thought I’d be able to do with Wave before I used it and got confused, frustrated, and finally bored.

I haven’t checked on my Wave account in months (has it been months?) but I’ve checked in on Buzz a dozen times already, not counting the emails (are they emails?) that alerted me via my Android phone that someone had commented on something in Buzz.

Of course I’ve checked in a bunch of times: it’s email. We all have email. Specifically, we all have Gmail.

If Wave has failed to take off it’s because it’s

• in need of some enterprising gang (Basecamp, can you hear me?) to build a killer app on top of it so we don’t have to Wave in the raw and
• requires another signup and the inconvenience that comes with migration.

By anchoring in Gmail, Buzz removes signup and migration pain in one step. And it’s got just enough functionality to make it interestingly messy, but not enough to overwhelm.

Buzz isn’t perfect right now but I won’t get into my quibbles with it because they’re boring, obvious, and probably already fixed and being tested as I write this. And I won’t say “this will fundamentally change email” because prognostications are just as boring as complaints.

But I will say that I think sharing stuff on the internet with my friends just became a little bit easier and therefore made the internet a little bit more fun.

Twitter and Conference Rage

An interesting post by Michael Fienen about David Galper’s keynote presentation at a recent HighEdWeb conference — and the Twitter backchannel that resulted (it starts at 12pm).

Twitter allows two things to happen very well: mobs feed on themselves, and the slippery slope gets very steep and extremely slick. There’s also the snowballing analogy… Bottom line, there was a lack of respect for the topic, a clear void in researching the audience, and just bad presentational ability. A perfect storm, if you will. And once the tweeting started, it simply became more fun to be in the stream than put up with the presentation. In a way, it was less about being snarky towards the speaker, and more about amusing each other by sharing and exaggerating the pain.

We touched on this a few months ago: the idea that Twitter is, as yet, a social space largely unregulated by norms of behaviour. There are further thoughts elsewhere about this particular example and some possible lessons: are we moving from a model of passive consumption in conferences to one of active participation? Does the ‘unconference’ model so successfully employed by, for example, BookCamp Vancouver last week, provide more value to attendees? Has the burden changed from audiences (to pay attention to the presenters) to presenters (to better know their audiences)?

Blogging pre-posterous is going to look… just screwy

post@posterous.com would be a perfect user experience if it weren’t for the layers of complexity we’ve grown accustomed to and are frustrated in trying to locate in it.

When Mark said to me the other day that Posterous’ unique take on the sign-up process was that there wasn’t one, I thought he was being glib for the sake of argument. Apparently not. And I didn’t dream that that non-existent process was carried through the entire user experience.

The internet… is that the one with email?

One email and you’re blogging. Another email and you’re still blogging. Carry on forever if you like and never set a password or edit a profile.

When has the link between intention and action in written communication for public consumption ever been this direct? Even Luther had to let the ink dry before leaving his house with a hammer and nail.

Though I’m still not sure what I’ll do with it, I’m giving it a go (Posterous, not Lutheranism — I remain a staunch former-Catholic). I’ve never had the motivation to set up a blog and I can take no technical credit for administering the one you’re reading. I’m not saying it ever looked exactly difficult to sign up for a WordPress or Blogger account, but it was always more trouble than I was willing to take.

Posterous is so damn easy it left me with no excuse for not starting immediately. Blogging already represents a very low barrier to reaching a huge potential audience, and Posterous drives this ankle-high barrier nearly into the ground by stripping away administrative inconvenience.

It’s not unlike the difference between very cheap and free and I wonder where else we’re going to see invisible inconveniences like sign-ups rendered visible by their abolition.

Is there something you’d like to share?

I stopped using Twitterfeed a couple of days ago. I had been using it to tweet my shared items from Google Reader.

There were a couple of reasons I quit using it, the least of which was the delay between my sharing the item in GReader and its appearing in Twitter. I never knew when a post I shared would be tweeted and for some reason that bothered me. I think I was afraid that I’d be in the middle of a really witty exchange someday and be interrupted by some asinine thing that hours prior I’d thought was worth showing around (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

But the main thing that made me dump Twitterfeed was the lack of context. Soon after I found out that it would tweet just the (shortened) link preceded by the headline I found that my sharing behaviour changed. For a number of days I shared only posts whose value was self-evident.

I told myself I was actually becoming a more selective GReader sharer, that the quality of my feed was improved for having the burden of a larger subsidiary audience. But this was not actually true.

What I’d become was a highly impersonal sharer, pointing at posts but saying nothing while at the same time trying to limit my sharing only to posts whose value was self-evident. In short, I had become intentionally obvious, which is a polite way of saying “boring”.

The value of GReader isn’t just the eclectic mix of posts you get to read by following your friends and others who share what they’re reading. It’s the ability to easily editorialize that makes it so compelling. Because GReader users can comment on the stories they share (and on the stories their friends share) they’re able to offer more than just a cool link: they’re offering context in which to appreciate the value of that link.

Seeing someone’s GReader shares through Twitterfeed is like watching Seth Godin give a talk without the sound on. You can see he’s saying something, but you’re constantly wondering, “Why are you showing me this?”

Meeting your teacher at the mall

I'm sure she meant her OTHER boss

If social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter were ever digital dorm parties, those days are long over. Everyone who knows you — your mom, your boss, the guy you were hoping would call, that pain-in-the-ass client — knows about Facebook, Twitter, and the next big thing. And when they find you on one of them they’ll expect that they’ve found the you that they know, and you’ll expect the same from them. But that’s not who you or they really are, is it?

At any given moment we perceive our social circle to be divided into segments. What divides them is usually a combination of circumstances largely beyond our control, but for the most part the divisions are organic in nature and not rigid. Who’s my colleague? Who’s my friend? Who’s family? While Facebook presents the language of social segmentation in checkboxes, implying that every 1-1 human relationship can be captured in a word, in normal practice the language of relationships and social segmentation is actually highly elastic, depending on who’s asking how I know so-and-so.

Social networking offers the illusion of social segment control. Facebook lets you give varying levels of access to different contacts and Twitter lets you hide from would-be followers while letting you brush off the ones you wish you hadn’t picked up. These features have in common the basic function of filtering. The trouble is, you only filter when you’ve got something to say that you’d rather not everyone heard. Shielding someone entirely from certain types of information hardly fits the bill as a means to acting naturally before each member of your social circle in the manner closest to your nature as they know it. It might not be your aim to make your mom think you have no social life, but that’s a typical effect of contact filtering.

One idea I’m hearing brought up with increasing frequency is to employ multiple accounts, one for each social segment (usually dividing work from family from friends). I don’t think I’ve seen anyone actually do it, but then if it were done well I wouldn’t perceive it, would I?

Let’s say I were to set up multiple Facebook/Twitter accounts for each of my social segments, letting alone for now the inevitable overlap of friends who are also coworkers and cousins I invite to parties, as well as the possibility that some of my contacts are are themselves running multiple accounts for each of their social segments, including me on some but not others.

Even if I managed to sort out each of the people in my life into the appropriate bucket, how would I decide which of my identities to speak through at any given moment? That is, if each account is a filter to the world, how can I effectively filter the data of my life into the appropriate account? Is a work-safe life event also parent-safe? How can I spin one event so everyone can hear about it in the most appropriate way?

Looks to me like a mug’s game. At some point I’m going to say something through one identity that I probably should have said through another, thereby degrading the integrity of each. Or everything I say is going to run together, leading to a situation indistinguishable from the one that the creation of multiple identities was supposed to depart from, ie. “real life.”

If anyone is successfully employing multiple accounts to deal with multiple social segments, I bet they’re having a hard time being anywhere near as interesting there as they are in person.

Social networking doesn’t facilitate the creation of different identities, or the rigid differentiation between segments of one’s social circle. You don’t actually have multiple faces. You never really did.

These platforms just let each segment hear what you’re saying to the others, and in turn show you what goes on when people step out of your life to get on with their own.

Remember how it felt to run into your teacher at the mall on summer vacation? I think we’re going to start getting used to that feeling.

Zero tolerance for silence, or the literalization of “Writers write.”

Sorry -- I thought you were going to say something

I more or less stopped writing fiction and poetry after grad school. It was probably a combination of factors that put me off it in the end — among them my lack of output in the absence of deadlines and my complete ignorance of the basic mechanics of narrative — but especially effective was the indifference of literary magazines to the work I sent them.

Sometime between now and when I gave up on becoming a writer, the definition of the word got blurry.

Writing used to be a job that writers got paid to do by institutions such as book publishers and newspapers. Being a writer wasn’t about writing per se; it was about being published. And it was my failure to be published that convinced me that I wasn’t really a writer.

Today it’s often sufficient for a writer to be able to say that he writes and is read. “Writers write” was once the refrain of creative writing professors instilling in their students the value of constant practice in the pursuit of craft. Now it’s literally true.

As newspapers die away, it’s going to be increasingly important for writers to establish credibility based not on the publications they’ve written for but on the quality of their thought. Writers will find themselves associated with certain topics because they have something to say, not because they’ve been paid to say something.

By way of blogging, we’ve all been granted universal access to  the upside of self-publishing without the garage full of butt-ugly books.

What got me thinking about this was a book coming out soon. It’s about a technology company whose devices have attained near-ubiquity in the last half-decade or so. It’s the first book-length study of this company from a major publisher and I’m eager to read it, so last week I looked up the author to see what else he’d written and what he was about as a writer. I wanted to know if the book was going to read like Fast Company or The Financial Post.

I was so disappointed with the results I decided that I needed to write this post, and that it would be unkind to disclose either his name or the title or subject of his book.

Here’s what I found:

• The author’s blog goes back less than 2 years and hasn’t been updated for 2 months. Did I mention he’s supposed to have written about a technology company? And that his book is out soon?
• The blog contains little more than abridged press releases from the company he’s written about. No idea what he thinks about the company’s direction or their latest offerings.
• Even though he appears to have written his own Wikipedia page, there’s nothing in his bibliography suggesting he’s the right guy to be writing this book.

Where’s the passion? The obsession? Where’s the writing? Where is a reason for anyone to pay $30 for a hardcover book written by him on a subject to which he appears to be less familiar than his potential readers?

On the area of an author’s purported expertise (what is authorship of a book but a declaration of authority?) what are we, the market of his potential readers, to make of his silence?

Stowaway Data: Datachondria at 50 Posts

Time for a recap of sorts as we hit our 50th post. We’ve written a great deal about books, but also about other media from film and album cover art right through to the humble business card. With more than six months under the bridge, a number of themes have emerged.

Human relationships in the 20th century were, in delicate and subtle ways, managed in part by the values we grafted onto objects produced and distributed by traditional — industrial — processes. These personal metadata were ‘stowaways’. We didn’t necessarily mean to tell people about ourselves by reading Infinite Jest on the subway — but glances were stolen and judgments were made nonetheless.

These communications were essential to enable some basic interactions. Flirting. Dating. Partying. Business networking. With these incidental transmission channels closing down as we consume content in new ways, we’re going to have to renegotiate, collectively, experimentally, how we communicate. Cultural objects — business cards, book covers, shared music experiences — no longer function in the same way. What does it mean for our relationships? Will we, now, be bowling together — or bowling aloner?

And so we’ve been thinking and writing about the conversations we are now beginning to have — about how to converse.

• How are new friends supposed to judge the prospects of our relationship when we don’t have CDs displayed in the living room?
• Is it rude to withhold the password to your wifi network from your dinner guests?
• Why are smartphones still more or less phone-shaped?
• How will you know who to hit on when you can’t see what anyone’s reading on their Kindle?
• Are boomers and MP3-raised kids going to lose their hearing at the same time? How will this impact music production techniques?
• How does commentary and criticism work when we’re being sold to by algorithms that can operate profitably without coercing us to consume in common?
• Is Twitter an appropriate reference check for a job interview? A classified ad?
• Does Last.fm herald the end of the musical “guilty pleasure”?
• Is it rude to tweet what you wouldn’t say out loud?
• What would music look like if we could classify it as we really experienced it?
• What can pedometers tell us about how we will read in the future?
• If you could interlink books, music, film, photographs, and the world around you, would you ever leave the house?

Along the way, we’ve written about everything from the perils and pleasures of filter failure, the transformative effects of audiobooks, and how Twitter dissolves cognitive dissonance. Along with much, much more.

We’ve also made at least two Lebowski references. This seems shockingly low. We promise to redress over the next 50 posts. Thanks for sticking with us.

The Phone is Technology Inertia

A post by Derek Thompson for The Atlantic Monthly’s fine new ideas blog reminded me of something Nathan wrote recently about the impending redundancy of the cellphone. With the development of the MiFi, alongside the ongoing revolution in mobile software applications, trying to cram all of this functionality into a small hand-to-ear device is going to seem increasingly foolish.

Why do we think we need a phone at all? It’s a vestige of a nineeenth century technology that we’ve been progressively adapting to do more and more things — take and store photos, browse the internet, store and play music. This is the anxiety that some feel about an eBook reader — where would it fit? Wouldn’t the ideal eBook reader be larger than the iPhone? When Apple’s iTablet Touch finally materializes, will it be yet another device to carry around?

How about this: the tablet lives in your bag. A bluetooth headset — working off voice navigation like an iPod shuffle — tends to your urgent phone and audio needs. If you need to do anything more complex — read a book, browse the internet, work — you reach for the tablet.

The phone is now a classic example of technology inertia. Why should anyone have to communicate by holding something next to their head?

In Twitter, No One Can See You Being Rude

A number of people have remarked recently that the environment in which someone can switch from being a Twitter neophyte to a true believer is a business conference.

Conferences give Twitter users the opportunity to provide commentary (and factual corrections) to what is being presented; to provide updates to a remote audience; and to engage with one another on a number of levels from professional networking to semi-anonymous flirtation.

It’s fascinating that the feeling of a ‘back channel’ can provoke not only a more open and participatory discussion, but can also license behavior that would otherwise be frowned upon. A ‘kids at the back of the class’ mentality can develop, wherein the shortcomings of the presenter’s style or of the venue are called out. These kinds of things would not be considered appropriate if they involved passing notes or calling across the room. But Twitter doesn’t just make these things surreptitiously possible; it is also so new that the ground-rules for social behavior have not yet been established.

But part of it may be that the medium itself allows such a broad variety of messages that social norms can never become established.

Within this, of course, lies that rather tedious discussion about the extent to which one’s online identity — masked by some measure of anonymity (or, at least, not-there-ness) — can exist distinct of one’s “real-world” identity. But it’s telling that several newcomers to Twitter ask questions about whether they should establish separate accounts for personal and professional identities. That’s part of the appeal of a Facebook app like Selective Twitter: it allows you to filter your output for potentially different audiences.

But as you spend more time with Twitter, it becomes clear that people’s expectations of the media are that it provide a constant mixture of personal and professional. It isn’t at all unusual for you to learn what a business contact ate for dinner, or to read a friend filtering a technical business conference. Part of that is the openness of the platform: you can choose who to follow, be it Neil Gaiman or your best friend. With that range of participants, what kinds of social rule set could we collectively agree to apply?

These are, of course, just a handful of the social reasons for Twitter’s popularity, quite distinct from its more frequently cited technical adaptability. It provokes an extra level of interaction that simply didn’t — couldn’t — exist before. And it may remain, to some extent, permanently wild.