Week 7: How I read, and why

I wanted to like e-books - I really did. I am always reading something, and the convenience of being able to download a book on the spot, for cheaper, and without having to find space on the shelf to put it on after, seemed great! But I just can't seem to get into a novel, even by one of my favourite authors, if it's presented on a screen.

I'm not sure how much of this is nostalgic, and how much of it is physiological and might be linked to how my eyes and brain absorb text (note: not a scientist). I read a lot as a child, and have great memories of curling up with books in various places, so nostalgia may certainly be a part of it. I also continue to enjoy spending hours in a book store browsing the shelves and reading excerpts. But on the other side, I continue to find it extremely difficult to read anything at all on a screen, from newspapers to journal articles. For school, if it is a text that I want to be able to remember anything about, at all, after reading it, I have to print it - all the highlighting and annotating functions available on the screen don't seen to help. I even have to print out my papers to proofread! For other materials, I have the same problems: for example, I find that when reading the news online, I get about 2 paragraphs in and then I just get frustrated, give up, and start to skim (this doesn't happen to me if I happen to have a physical paper, so I doubt it's a matter of not enjoying reading the daily news). 

I realize that PDF articles and online journals are very different from eBooks, as was highlighted by Rowberry (2015). But the fact that I can't even seem to do actual work on a screen without either getting frustrated or feeling as though I entirely wasted my time (absorbing nothing at all) does not leave me much hope that I will ever be able to adapt to reading an ebook for pleasure, even if it is on a highly-adaptable ebook technology as opposed to the 'twitchy little screens' mentioned by Proulx (Maxwell, 2013). 


Sources:


Maxwell, John W. (2013). E-Book Logic: We Can Do Better. "Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada" 51, no. 1, 29-47.

Simon Rowberry. (2015) Ebookness. "Convergence: the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies"[pre-print; no vol/no assigned yet], 1-18.