It’s commonly believed that there is a significant difference between how we approach ebooks and paper and print books. In fact, Sarada never reads books off any kind of screen for this reason and I’m sure she’s not alone. Rather gratifyingly for us old codgers, it turns out that this is backed up not only by research for us ancient ones, but also for digital natives. At the same time, ebooks do seem to offer some pluses.
I’m not sure when the first idea for an ebook arose. Certainly the ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ is a fictional ebook, although a dedicated one. However, there’s an older design called the Dynabook, dating from 1968 which was intended to look something like this:
Alan Kay’s idea was basically a GUI-powered laptop which was to inspire Xerox’s computers in the 1970s and was later adopted by Apple when they produced the Lisa and Mac, and went on to become the tablet computers and laptops of today. The display here is supposed to be one megapixel and touch-sensitive, there’s a stylus and removable memory, and it’s aimed at children. Around that time also, Arthur C Clarke had described a flat-screen newspaper reader in his 1968 novel, ‘2001, A Space Odyssey’, which went on to be depicted in the film itself. Before this, so far as I can tell the concept of ebooks was preceded by microfiche and microfilm readers, and the basic idea for these dates from 1851 and was used for pigeon ring messages in the 1870s. Hence people were actually reading text on screens, projected from a sheet of photographic film, way back into the 1920s, when the Library of Congress photographed a large number of books in the British Library for archival purposes, before the advent of public television. To be picky, silent movies would also have involved the reading of text off screens, though very brief passages, and there were also credits. There was also the “Readie”, an idea inspired by the “Talkie”, i.e. a movie with audio, which was:
A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around, attach to any old electric light plug and read hundred-thousand-word novels in 10 minutes if I want to, and I want to. [This machine would] allow readers to adjust the type size and avoid paper cuts.
Bob Brown, 1930.
This is of about the same age as the oldest paperback books, and a couple of thoughts occur on reading it. One is that it actually predates mains power sockets and needed to be plugged into a light socket instead, and the other is that it’s reminiscent of futurism with its un-ironic emphasis on speed. The perception was that cinema was outpacing the written word and therefore that there should be ereaders which would give it a boost. It’s notable that there’s not a lot of contemplation or concentration implied by this, and it isn’t clear whether this is to do with optimism about accelerating the human brain or something else. Like many other ideas of the time, there’s a disturbing air to it, at least for someone such as myself, born in the mid-twentieth century, because the speed seems to reflect a reaction against a slower, more meditative way of life. In a way, the attitude expressed here could even be seen as outdated because this is from the age of Dada rather than Futurism. Futurism is so-called because it’s supposed to outstrip even Modernism. It rejects tradition and the kind of comforts we’re used to, and is notoriously anti-feminist. This kind of idea is also akin to eugenics: that we don’t need many of the people who hold us back such as the disabled and those who have learning difficulties, and by extension the idea that there should be an Aryan master race because it had achieved so much more than everyone else, supposèdly. It’s pretty scary, and if ideas are presented sufficiently fast, maybe people won’t think about them so much. This applies also to novels and poetry because that kind of literature read at speed probably won’t work as well as a way of developing empathy and emotional wisdom, if at all. Brown’s idea is reminiscent of Speedwords, a system which attempted to compress information into less space and time, because he wanted to include special punctuation and abbreviations to accelerate reading speed further.
In the post-war era, the Spanish school teacher Angela Ruiz Robles became concerned for the welfare of her pupils having to lug heavy textbooks around all the time and invented a pneumatic-mechanical system called the
Enciclopedia Mecánica. This came to include electric illumination and a magnifying glass, and it’s interesting to contrast the vast arena the men’s inventions seem to attempt to encompass with the far more practical and personal approach this woman took.
Videotex originated in the UK in the late 1960s. It turned into what we thought of as Teletext and Prestel, which when the specifications were first issued was in fact ahead of what could be practically achieved at the time on a domestic terminal. The screen was forty columns wide and I think twenty-five lines deep, and guidelines for composition included the stipulation that paragraphs should be no more than four lines long, which is equivalent to a hundred and sixty characters, similar to Twitter in the pre-Trump era (oh, those halcyon days!). Since there was also a line between each paragraph and the graphics, and there also needed to be room on the screen for the graphics, and also every time a text effect was needed such as a colour change and double height a character space had to be skipped, it didn’t leave much for information. Even so, it’s notable that the nature of the content had to be altered to make it more manageable. I haven’t attempted to read an entire book on a 40×25 text screen. This format was later adopted by the BBC Micro to enable it to access both teletext services and software downloads via the TV aerial. Later still, Tangerine computers developed the Oric-1, which was supposed to be a Spectrum killer, but rather than catching on as such it ended up in the unexpected position of forming the basis of a French machine called the Telestrat, which was oriented around online communication via the telephone system, due to its very teletext-like text screen.
At around the same time as the beginning of Videotex, Michael Hart started Project Gutenberg, in 1971, with the US Constitution, Bill of Rights and the Bible. This was motivated by a desire to give back, having been given some storage space on a computer at his university. There’s so much in the commons and motivated by altruism which built the more positive aspects of the world of today. These books would have been accessed via CRT monitors with a wider screen, but green on black and monochrome. It’s difficult to read from such a screen, leading to fatigue and eye strain, which means that people probably would’ve read only short passages at a time even though the number of characters per screen would have reached about two thousand, translating to around five hundred words, by this point. The limitations of having to use an actual television tube would not have applied in that respect at least. But it’s still difficult to read off an old-style CRT. I used to find it made me irritable and I imagine it triggered seizures in some people. However, one big advantage of a CRT was that it was equally bright from any viewing angle, which was not the case with LCD flat screens as they relied on polarised light and ended up needing non-transparent electronics to support the pixels, leading to them appearing like a grid rather than a smooth display.
I just want to mention one more prehistoric ebook system, this time from 1980, because it illustrates something significant about the physicality of the devices involved. This is the US Defense Departments Personal Electronic Aid to Maintenance:
Wikimedia Commons
This is clunky and rather large, and it has a kind of physical presence to it which modern ebook readers lack. A physical book has substantial weight and size. Church Bibles and the Encyclopædia Britannica come to mind here although the early editions of the latter were quite small per tome. They feel like Serious Business in a way a Kobo or Kindle don’t. The above device was just for manuals for military equipment as far as I can tell, but considering the seriousness and weight military grade stuff has, it has a similar kind of aura. If you took one of these out and read ‘War And Peace’ on it, it would seem strangely appropriate, although its capabilities are largely obscure to me.
I wasn’t planning to turn this into a history of ebooks here so I’m going to skip forward. In the late 1990s, the ability to produce paper-like displays which use reflected light became feasible and this led to the first ereader as we would recognise them today, the Rocketbook, seen above. Something about the frame and the minimalism of the controls appeals to me here, that makes it feel more like a book, or perhaps even a painting – a work of art. I can imagine it also had a fair amount of heft to it. I have to say also that from an ecological perspective the idea of electronic paper is very appealing because of the low power required to maintain it, and there are late ereaders which will even continue to display the final page viewed after being turned off. Practically zero power consumption, in other words. Today’s ereaders still have that sometimes, but like many other bits of kit today they tend to gravitate towards mobile phones, which in this case means they’re tablets. I have a Kindle Fire, and although I read ebooks on it, I think of it as a tablet. I also wish I wasn’t supporting Amazon, and I’ll go into that in a bit.
It’s significant that there is now a division between the “software”, in this case the content of the ebooks on the device, and the devices themselves. I only ever thought of the Guide as an “electronic book”, in the words of Ford Prefect. With “DON’T PANIC” written in large friendly letters on the cover it was only ever going to be a display device for the stored content inside it, although this was somewhat modified as the series continued. There was no distinction between the book and its text, as it were. You couldn’t use it for anything else, except perhaps for eating your sandwiches off it. It was iconic enough to form the centre piece of the entire epic adventure in time and space, as an integrated product. However, looking at the Infocom version (later part of Activision) above, it can also be used as a calendar, clock, calculator, tan guide and “salad slasher”. I feel this takes it away from the original vision to some extent, but it’s clearly a satire on creeping featurism, though at a time before most people seemed to be aware of the issue. In the original, it was the towel which was more useful, even being modded sometimes to increase its utility. The Guide is not a towel.
This raises an issue with ereaders used as apps rather than dedicated devices, and there’s a further issue that a whole library is stored on an ereader or perhaps online nowadays. I use my Kindle as a radio, music player, TV set, calculator, star chart and all sorts of other things, and of course I also use the web browser and social media apps. It has the same kind of clutteredness to it as much experience via devices has these days, and that interferes with focus, attention span and concentration. I don’t think you even have to use the other apps for this to happen. You’re aware that they’re there, and that in principle you could close the book and “go” elsewhere at any time. The fact that I watch TV programmes and films, and perhaps even more YouTube with its own ephemeral tendencies and speed of delivery, through the very same display as I read ebooks is probably not conducive to taking them seriously. I currently have eight and a half dozen ebooks on the Kindle, and although I have read lots of them, I’ve also abandoned quite a few in mid-flow and gone on to buy more before continuing, although to be honest I’ve also tended to do that with paper books.
Research has compared physical and electronic books. I myself considered writing a dissertation comparing word processed, typed and written documents, though it came to nothing, back in 1989 – I abandoned it because the department required everything to be typed and preferred word processed documents. As that suggests, this is nothing new. Before I go there, I want to ask you some questions. You have now read a little over two thousand words, a zagier and a third if we’re going to stick to duodecimal, on, I presume, a screen of some description. How do you feel about it? How is it different from reading it in a magazine or a book? What would it be like if this had been handwritten, on a scroll, in a codex (a spined book) or on sheets of paper? I once wrote an essay using till receipts. How would that be? And is what you’re doing now similar to reading an ebook?
Paper books have corners, thickness, the ability to have bookmarks shoved in them, pages, page numbers and so forth. They’re also bound, sometimes in boards or, unfortunately, leather, and have spines, and they can have appreciable weight. I don’t know, but I imagine that when paperbacks first came out they were not taken as seriously as hardbacks. Nonetheless we did adjust. However, it’s been found that even people for whom electronic forms of communication and presenting text are familiar, ebooks don’t work as well as paper ones. It definitely isn’t just a generational thing. Ebooks are harder to navigate due to their lack of physicality, and their text can reflow easily. It may be a feature rather than a bug, but when I “flick” back to a previous page on the Kindle, I often find it’s been presented in a different format so that, say, a chapter which previously started at the top of a page now starts halfway down, and this takes me out of the immersive experience because it makes it ontic – the ebook reader becomes a tool whose encumbrance draws my attention negatively to its existence like a wet or smeary pair of spectacles. It is genuinely harder to navigate around in an ebook because of this absense of physical cues. As you work your way through a codex, you’re gradually assembling a sketchy map of the book in a way which either can’t be done with an ebook or is dependent on different cues such as the scroll bar. It’s even been suggested that ebooks open like a codex and have sides which inflate and deflate according to where you are in the text, which calls Robles to mind.
Humans didn’t evolve in situations where actual reading was necessary for survival, so the skills we use to do so are cobbled together from other abilities which were. Consequently, when we look at text we’re engaging with what we perceive as objects arranged in a particular way. Studies show that when reading cursive or ideographic script, we engage our motor cortices and subliminally imagine our hands writing out the characters concerned. Sarada would probably confirm that I unconsciously tend to write my thoughts in the air with my fingers at times. This is less true of printed text, but does highlight the physical element of reading. We mirror the act of reading with subliminal writing, probably because we physically engage with the text, and it’s harder to do so when it’s on a screen.
All of this brings to mind the possibility of entering into virtual reality to read an ebook. The popular astronomy program Celestia is generally a kind of graphics engine for three-dimensional exploration of the Cosmos, but it only lends itself to that and even though it was designed for those purposes, it includes a secret add-on for diary-writing. This creates a codex containing text from a file which is hidden at the centre of the Sun. It would be interesting to engage with that book and compare it to reading the same text purely off a screen sans accoutrements.
It’s been shown that students reading PDFs, which are more like physical books than ebooks are, tend to have difficulty finding information, and particularly returning to it, within a text than they do with codices. It’s also common for people to print out PDFs if they want to read them in more depth, but there’s still a problem there if you then have a stack of single-sided paper to read. Not only does it seem wasteful, but it also gives it a kind of disposable quality which binding removes. There’s also no recto/verso arrangement to remember, which would help you find the right bits. Ereaders, so far as I know, don’t even allow you to print the text out or copy-paste it so it can be, which would in any case be laborious and time-consuming.
The separation of device from content confers the same kind of disposable essence to a text as printing out a PDF. The ereader in front of you is not the book. It’s only pretending to be the book for the time being. This is why the Guide would be a better ebook than one stored in an ereader. Another approach I saw suggested once was in the series ‘The Mighty Micro’, broadcast in the early 1980s, which envisaged the texts being stored on ROM cartridges like games or software, which could be slotted into the ereader and had the branding of the books themselves on them. This, I think, would’ve worked well although it’s anachronistic in today’s online world. My tendency not to read through a whole ebook is probably partly due to this ephemeral nature and partly down to not constantly knowing where I am in the text and how much longer I need to persist. On the other hand, as David Lodge pointed out when contrasting cinema and codices, this makes it easier to surprise the reader and reflects our own lives, where we generally don’t know how long we’ve got left to live.
Reading a physical book also builds stronger associations externally than an ebook. I can remember the spine of C S Lewis’s ‘Voyage Of The Dawn Tr?der’ cracking and the pages falling out, and the fact that it had a typo on either the cover or the running heading meaning that I still don’t know if it’s ‘Dawn Trader’ or ‘Dawn Treader’. I recall that the last page of ‘Alice In Wonderland’ was missing and I didn’t read it until years later, and that the coupon for ordering the LP of ‘Don’t Panic’ was at the back of the first Hitch-Hiker’s book, overlapping with the last two lines of the page and necessitating my mother writing those two lines at the top of that page when I cut it out and posted it. I can remember that A E van Vogt’s story ‘The Sound’ is spelt ‘The Soond’ on the penultimate page on the running heading of my copy. All of these help to make the stories more memorable to me. There’s also when and where I read something, and how I got hold of it. I recall the incessant stamping of library books I pored over as a child, and the location on the shelves of the mysterious third Alice book. I don’t think any of this carries through to the ebook experience. I can reorganise the order of books in my Kindle library with a single tap of my finger. Reorganising a bookcase is a considerably more engaging and time-consuming activity. ‘A Woman In Your Own Right’ has a reflective cover so that if a woman picks it up, she becomes the cover illustration. Another book has glasspaper covers so that it can’t be put on the shelf without damaging its neighbours or the bookcase. Brian Stableford’s ‘A History Of The Third Millennium’ hardback edition has a hologram of either a sprig of acorns or an ammonite fossil on the front. None of these things are currently possible with ebooks.
But I’m not here to bury ebooks. I also want to praise them. As I’ve said, I do have a Kindle Fire and although I have no Kobo I do have Kobo ebooks which I read via a laptop app. I am both aware and extremely bothered about Amazon’s ethical record and do generally avoid buying anything physical from them, but I do download Kindle ebooks from them. I realise this too swells their coffers, and I’m not offering any more excuse for that than the usual one that the system has to change, but using ebooks means they haven’t been transported and fewer physical resources have been consumed to produce them. Not none, and there’s the embodied energy in the device itself and the various no doubt dodgy things Amazon do extends to their ebooks in one way or another, but I myself have an ebook or two on Amazon so I’m to a very limited degree exploited by them too. I’m tempted to go off on one here about Amazon’s exceedingly dubious politics and ethics, particularly regarding workers’ rights, but instead I will resist the temptation and make this point: I do not believe in the system which has enabled any such organisation to reach such power and wealth, and there’s an aspect of boycotting, which I very avidly do, which is a kind of guilt-tripping distraction from the actual unethical practices of the company itself. However, it still feels like Amazon owns all the ebooks in my library because it could cut me off at any point, and it’s notable that there doesn’t seem to be a Kobo app for the Kindle, which is probably the least surprising fact in history.
Ebooks appeal to minimalism. I’m currently sitting in a room which, like several others in this house, contains hundreds of books, and they’re a fait accompli of course, and they have intrinsic value absent from ebooks, but in order to achieve a degree of compactness in one’s life it would help in future if I acquired as many books as possible in electronic form. But I would like to have those books physically stored in a device. To an extent I’ve achieved this, because a while ago I took a large number of books which are out of copyright but widely available, such as ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ and the complete works of Shakespeare, to the charity shop and have them as text files, PDFs or HTML documents stored locally, but I have also bought a number of life sciences textbooks in physical form recently. I also have some illustrated Kindle ebooks which I view by plugging the laptop into the 70 cm TV screen rather than on the laptop or tablet, and this helps.
What would help even more would be for the spirit that led Michael Hart to found Project Gutenberg still to be alive, well and dominant on the internet, so that we could actually own ebooks, perhaps paid for, and not have them kind of lent to us by Amazon and others. That said, even with that situation, there are identifiable and persistent drawbacks to ebooks still experienced by the current generation which do not depend at all on unfamiliarity with technology.
A Box Of Chocolates 