Do e-books free us from distractions? Responding to Tim Parks

This morning Shelf Awareness serves up this quote of the day, and it stops me.  I think I might just move on, but I can't.

Because Parks' assertion that reading the e-book frees us from "everything extraneous and distracting" ... "to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves" in no way jibes with my experience.  Yes, I have downloaded dozens of books onto my iPad.  Sadly, I've left many of them stranded.  Unable to scribble in the margins, dog-ear the pages, underline emphatically—unable, in other words, to engage in a physical way with the text—I grew distracted, disinterested, bored.  Yes, Michael Ondaatje will always keep me reading.  And so will the work of my friend Kelly Simmons, and the words of Julie Otsuka, Leah Hager Cohen, A.S. King, Timothy Schaffert, Paula Fox, and Justin Torres—though I wish I owned all of that work on paper.  But here on my iPad—stranded, unfinished—sit Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones, Andrew Winer's The Marriage Artist, Margaret Drabble's complete short stories, and many other tales. These are, most likely, extremely good books, and yet, I find myself incapable of focusing on them in their e-format.  I need to interact—physically—with the texts before me.  I can't do that, in the ways I'd like to do that, with a screen.

I am also, as a footnote, intrigued by Tim Parks' final lines, when he speaks of moving on from illustrated children's books.  With the rise of the graphic novel and the increasing insertion of images back into teen books (and I suspect we'll see that illustration encroachment continue), I wonder if we have really moved away from illustrated texts.  I wonder, too, if we should. Art is not just for juveniles, after all.

Here is the quote at length, as excerpted by Shelf Awareness.

"The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children's books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups."

--Tim Parks in his post headlined "E-books Can't Burn" at the New York Review of Books blog

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Unglue.it: Changing the future of E-books and Libraries?

My brother, Jeff, the famous juggler, ran with an extraordinary crowd.  The top performers at our Radnor High.  The electrical engineers and physicists of Princeton and then Stanford.  I never really knew what any of his friends were talking about, but I liked hanging out with them, feeling smarter than I was or ever will be, and if I sometimes typed a paper for one or the other or (amazingly) caught one of their Frisbee throws, they didn't mind too much if I later  joined them for bike rides in Palo Alto, walks through redwood forests, evenings on the glorious Princeton campus.

Eric Hellman was in the mix—a smart guy with a laconic sense of humor who went on to do bold things as a physicist before he fell in love with the idea of being a book entrepreneur.  Recently our paths crossed again as I became intrigued by Eric's newest business, something called Unglue.it—a new model for digitizing and sharing books that might, in the estimation of some, redefine the future of libraries...and of authors.

Today my feature story on Unglue.it runs in Publishing Perspectives.  I encourage authors who own the rights to books that have not yet been digitized to take a look.  There's opportunity here. 

Here's how my story begins.  Please consider reading the whole.

People, Eric Hellman is fond of saying, have a funny relationship to books. They’ll cram them onto shelves, stuff them several layers deep. They’ll talk about their love for them, defend them, take them to bed. They’ll buy several copies of their personal favorites and parcel them off to friends. Maybe books aren’t people and people aren’t books. Still: The line is thin.

My other stories for Publishing Perspectives can be found here:



The Value Rubric:  Do Book Bloggers Really Matter?

The Attraction-Repulsion of International Literature: My conversation with Alane Salierno Mason

Transforming Children's Book Coverage at the New York Times: My conversation with Pamela Paul

Success is when the world returns your faith:  My conversation with editor Lauren Wein

Between Shades of Gray:  The Making of an International Bestseller 
 

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