Week 7: Perhaps it's time to give the e-book a chance

Print reading-The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

Upon reflection, I’ve noticed a distinct divide in what I choose to read in print and what I choose to read on screen. Essentially, this divide is leisure and school. I’m not sure if the reason behind this is subconscious or purely out of convenience. Typically, for both work and school I read countless journal articles, the majority of which are available online. Over the past year, I’ve decided to take advantage of my 50-minute commute and read for pleasure. As I mentioned last week, I tried to read on the Kindle, but despite it being convenient and portable I just couldn’t commit. So I continue to purchase and borrow print books—I even joined a monthly book club to really take advantage of reading what I want to read. I do have a Kindle app on my computer, and I noticed that I primarily have recipe books on it. I feel as though digital reading for me is a matter of convenience. I read recipes on my computer so I can have them readily available as I bake or cook while simultaneously listening to music online. I also have many classic works on iBooks (Frankenstein, Macbeth, Pride & Prejudice, etc.), but have opted for print editions of these rather than the electronic ones.

Kindle reading-recipes from Diane Sanfilippo

Thinking about what I do and don’t read on screen has made me realize that I may be closing myself off to an entire realm of reading and interacting with texts by avoiding digital content for leisure. Trettien suggests that electronic editions of texts have the potential to “shed light on old literature,” providing a window to explore the particularities of a work (Trettien 2013, 27). I may sound like a broken record, but again this comes back to what we discussed in our first week of class: digital technologies can (and, in some cases, should) enhance our understanding of a work. Of course, this mostly applies to the digitization of print works, but I think this is crucial. What can a digital representation help us discover about an existing work? Is there something I could gain by reading Macbeth or Pride & Prejudice on iBooks that I can’t in print? As I’ve discussed in a previous blog post, this concept is also pertinent to the study of art history where the features of zooming and cropping can open up completely new and enlightening interpretations of an artwork. In light of this, I am very intrigued to explore the Alice for the iPad app that Ashley wrote about at the beginning of the term, which Professor Galey also mentioned in Monday’s class. It seems like this app is successful in transforming the story, both in text and image.

After reading Simon Peter Rowberry’s article, “Ebookness,” I do feel as though I have a greater understanding and appreciation for the production of e-books. I think that perhaps I have taken for granted that these are also created objects, they necessarily have a human presence. This means that both creative and technical decisions contribute to their production much in the same way that these decisions are integral to the creation of a print book. In thinking about the physical makeup of an e-book, Rowberry explains that the publisher’s instructions for content, format and users’ options are largely determined by the software that interprets them, so e-books may look different when read on different platforms (Rowberry 2015, 6). This seemingly obvious fact never occurred to me.  The decisions of what to include and what to exclude may impact how different readers receive and experience the e-book across these different platforms. This could become an interesting experiment and a great opportunity for some additional research into the many wonderful e-books available. In fact, an investigation into the relationship between a reader and the object as it appears and is transformed across digital and print editions might make an interesting paper topic…

References:

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

Trettien, Whitney Anne. "A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: the Case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica." Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013): http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000150/000150.html.