Week 7: Reading Habits

I enjoyed Maxwell’s use of Star Trek to discuss our expectations and preparation for the use of eBooks in the future, or rather, our present. While I agree with his assertion that in TNG Captain Picard is clearly portrayed as a reader, and while it is true that he is often seen reading from many tablet-like devices on the job (32), Maxwell skims over the fact that Picard often reads from our familiar codex book, even in the twenty-fourth century. In fact, a Google search for “Captain Picard reading” yields an equal number of images of him peering down at a hand held screen as those of him flipping through a print book. Having watched TNG it is also worth noting that Picard usually reads print books for pleasure, such as when he is depicted reading Shakespeare and other poets in his quarters during some rare downtime on the ship, or reading a novel on vacation. When he and other crewmembers are reading for work, however, they almost exclusively read from screens. I’m drawing attention to all of this because Picard’s reading habits and my own are quite similar.

I rarely, if ever, read for pleasure on screen. I most enjoy reading novels, essays, and short stories in my spare time, and I prefer to read all of these in a print book. This is perhaps simply a formed habit because I learned to read for this purpose in this format, and I associate the bodily sensations, the cliché of “curling up with a book,” with the mental process. Since I have been a grad student with very little time to read for pleasure, I am often reading to relax, in bed on a week night or on my couch on a lazy Saturday morning, and so I prefer not to associate these acts of reading with my laptop, where I do much of my reading for work or school.

Like my exclusive preference for print books and pleasure reading, I am equally dedicated to reading on a screen for school and work. I read essays, reports, or articles for school and work on my laptop and have done so since undergrad, and again this preference may have more to do with habit as I learned to effectively read and take notes about scholarly articles on a screen. I also find that this kind of reading often involves multitasking, such as note taking or cross referencing with other texts, and I find it easier and more organized to engage this process with multiple windows open on my virtual desktop than with multiple books spread across my physical desk. 

In thinking about this force of habit I identify in my reading preferences, I also wonder about readers from younger generations, and if their preferences might be more flexible. When I first learned to read, an activity akin to what I now think of as “reading for pleasure,” reading on screen wasn’t an option, but children learning to read these days can use both eBooks and tree books, and I wonder if, considering this week's blogging question as adults, they might not have a clear preference at all, and be the reading version of ambidextrous? Ambitextrous? (Sorry, couldn’t help myself).