Book People Archive

Re: MP3's vs eBooks

Charles Hall wrote:

> Enough already! But you get the idea. Will instant, total access to your
> book collection change the amount you read and what you read. To me the
> answer seems clear, YES, you'll read much more and much more broadly.
> (Publisher's take note... you will sell more stuff to more people.)
>
> But is this a false analogy? Are my non-fiction reference-book type
> reading habits a peculiarity? Am I just plain wrong? I'd love to hear
> comments from this diverse and thoughtful audience. But first imagine
> all your books accessible with the turn of a dial...

It will change (and has changed) not just the amount I read and what I read,
but *how* I read.  Since coming belatedly online some four year ago, I've
noticed that my curiosity has mushroomed, perhaps at the expense of my
attention span.  I look things up online that are readily available to me on
my bookshelves.  Case in point:  I'm sitting four or five feet from three
world atlases, but when I wanted to find the location of a town in Turkey, I
typed "Bodrum + map" into the Google search engine and had what I wanted
quicker than it would have taken me to locate the information in an atlas.

Now here comes the "how" part.  From the map, I skipped to about four other
websites that contained information about not only Bodrum, but other things:
Turkish art, Turkish resorts, the Aegean Sea...it was like being pulled in
several directions at once.

When I take a book off the shelf and read, it tends to be a much less
fragmented process.  Perhaps this comes at the expense of my idle curiosity;
I give one work or author my attention, and there is no siren singing
tantalizingly a mere mouse click away.

If my entire book collection were digital, I expect my reading would be much
more fragmented, but I'd make all sorts of connections that I'd never make
otherwise.  Perhaps I'd read more *interactively*, if that's a term that
makes sense.  But a lot would also depend on how well organized my
collection was and how disciplined I was about maintaining that
organization.  What I find with the many MP3 and text files I have on my
computer is that they're as good as lost if I don't keep them organized.
Judging from the deplorable state of just my bookmarked pages, this could
prove a daunting task.  I usually know where I've put a book; somehow a
visual memory perisists of what the cover looks like and which shelf it's
on.  I haven't developed a corresponding sort of memory for computer files,
alas.

On a slightly tangential note (but perhaps of interest to this group), there
was an intriguing article by Jaron Lanier in February's Discover magazine,
speculating on the consequences of trying to control file sharing:

A Love Song for Napster
http://www.discover.com/current_issue/index.html


Kay Douglas