Week 7: Screen Reading

In a previous blog post, I speak to my apprehension the first time that I chose to read an ebook. While I’ve certainly gotten over that initial worry, I find my pleasure reading remains almost exclusive print. There are several reasons for this: 1) there is something comforting about reading a book in print. My energies are focused exclusive on the book. I don’t need to worry about glare, or changing background settings, or be interrupted by iMessages (as my preferred platform to read ebooks, PDFs, etc. is the iPad mini). 2) Just as Dr. Galey mentioned in his blog post this week, I’m also concerned about my circadian rhythms and the effects of artificial light at night will have on my sleeping patterns. 3) I like the idea of building a small personal library. This is definitely more impressive in print than in digital form. Moreover, there is issues of sustainability of ebooks: will EPUB or iBooks formats, for instance, that I purchased in 2016 still be readable in 20 or 30 years from now? I like the idea of collecting meaningful books and being able to return to them years later.

This being said, I’ve recently changed my reading habits as they relate to readings that I do for my coursework. Throughout my entire undergraduate degree, a previous graduate degree, and up to about a month ago, I would print PDFs of journal articles or e-book chapters whenever possible. This would allow me to underline and annotate in the margins and, during essay writing, I would easily flip back and forth between sections of an article or be able to look at two articles side-by-side. Although a lot of this is possible on screen with a computer, I found it not to be a realistic option when I started my undergraduate degree in 2006.

In the past month, I’ve started to read all course-required readings available in PDF on my iPad mini in an app, GoodReader, which allows me to annotate and highlight. My decision to finally break with my close to 8-year practice of printing out journal articles steamed from a frustration in organizing all these printed documents (mostly poorly organized piles of articles on my desk) and a difficulty in keeping track of what I have read. For a couple years, I’ve been using Zotero for one-off assignments, which downloads the PDF articles and extracts their metadata in order to automatically generate citations. Zotero doesn’t have a build-in capacity to annotate PDFs, but (in my quest to find a work around) I found that it is possible to send PDFs to a tablet, annotate the file, and upload it back into Zotero. Furthermore, GoodReader allows me to email myself my annotations and highlights, which can prove to be useful when writing an essay. My decision to read on screen, when it comes to my course readings, is mostly an attempt to be more organized and efficient when referring back to these readings when writing assignments.

When it comes to ebooks assigned for course, I will only read them on screen if I can download the chapters as PDFs. In this week’s Rowberry article, the idea of the PDF not being an ebook steams from the fact that “[t]he difference resides in an emphasis on reflowability over facsimile” (15). I can’t help but think how much I would like if I would get any book that I’d like to annotate in PDF format.  The lack of standardization for the format of ebooks hampers the way that I wish that I could read on screen when it comes to academic research.

References

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