I currently read a lot in both digital and print formats. My reading is responsible for the death of trees for paper and the burning of fossil fuels for electricity. News and views I generally read digitally; books I prefer to read in hardcopy. But the balance changes.
I’ve been thinking seriously about the issues related to digital format all millennium. In fact, longer. I hope that it’s no longer the case, but when I was at graduate school one of the primary skills PhD students developed was photocopying: identifying essays, locating machines, fixing toner and then engaging in reaching a complicated Pareto optimality of cost, legibility and coverage.
In the 90s, text-based web interfaces weren’t conducive to finding and reading anything longer than about 800 words, but computer screens were getting bigger, brighter and clearer. In the early 2000s, I read a friend’s novel on his desktop rather than print it all out and it was a pleasant experience. Friends were worried about the death of books, but as I pointed out at length in 2012 I’m an optimist. This does not mean, however, that I’m a techno-determinist — we need to be mindful about how we read because we will get the tools we demand.
It seems incontrovertible that digital is impossible to beat for certain types of ease. For those who need something more eye-some than 8-point font there’s no longer any need to fish for the large-type copy in the library (you can read any book big!), just enlarge the font or listen on audio. Electronic publishing simplifies distribution, allowing instant, diverse accessibility for impatient readers and frustrated writers. As a curious browser of books there’s so much to read digitally; as an aspiring writer there’s so much opportunity to reach an appreciative audience.
And this is just assuming that books written from beginning to end are actually what we want to read, not just an accommodation of the needs we had and the distribution models available. For a very short introduction to lots of other types of possible formats, check out Samuel Arbesman’s post about reinventing publishing.
Many of the current science fiction writers I suggested for 2021 began publishing their own works digitally, albeit in a few different ways. Each author has a different story, but the easing of distribution has allowed for a proliferation of different genres, sub-genres and perspectives on genres that, at very least would have been slower had the traditional gatekeepers been in play.
However, any digital device is always half a step from petabytes of digital distraction. Whether that’s the bullies and bigots of social media or just the opiates of streaming video services doesn’t really matter. You want to curl up into a story and it’s just harder to do on an iPhone / iPad / Kindle.
Let’s come back to those gatekeepers again, though. For every excellent writer who has found admirers and audiences, there are at least ten who are self-published and have, deservedly, not found eitehr. Mass literacy, decentralized distribution and the absence of limiting cost and editors have produced a glut of jaw-droppingly poor books. Because it is as expensive to publish a 1000 page book as a 15 page one doesn’t mean your idea needs 1000 pages. Because it is difficult to find a good, supportive editor doesn’t mean the world will not benefit from editorial intervention.
Also, and this may only be my own experience but I think it is borne out empirically — there is a loss of quality in digital reading. I’m reminded of the quotation wrongly attributed to John Ruskin, “There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper….” Reading digitally, whether on desktop or mobile, is a flatter experience than reading a lumpy piece of coloured wood pulp.
Digital reading has no specificity of design. Every digital story is a kindle production. In contradistinction, each book reminds you of its individuality every time you pick it up, with its cover art, type spacing, type font, the yellowness of the page, the tightness of the binding.
Is there a digital delight anything like picking up a secondhand title at a used bookshop?