My good friend Bill Logan just sent me a link to a heartening article. Here are a couple of tidbits:
A 2014 study found that readers of a short mystery story on a Kindle were significantly worse at remembering the order of events than those who read the same story in paperback. Lead researcher Anne Mangen of Norway’s Stavanger University concluded that “the haptic and tactile feedback of a Kindle does not provide the same support for mental reconstruction of a story as a print pocket book does.”
And the second:
Slow-reading advocates recommend at least 30 to 45 minutes of daily reading away from the distractions of modern technology. By doing so, the brain can reengage with linear reading. The benefits of making slow reading a regular habit are numerous, reducing stress and improving your ability to concentrate.
As a poet I am, of course, a “slow-reading advocate.” Nothing reads slower than a poem, if it’s a good poem and if you’re reading it well. (This is why I consider Finnegans Wake a prose poem and not a novel. But that’s an argument for another day, when there’s time to argue slowly.) It’s also why I follow a wonderful blog called Slow Reads. The authors don’t deal only or even principally with poetry, but they bring a poetics of slow reading to all the texts they discuss.
Your mention of the Kindle made the mention of it in this article jump out for me. Thought you might enjoy these ponderings, Jim.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0017.125?view=text;rgn=main#N4-ptr1
I do see needs that electronic devices address better than paper books. Of course, it’s almost impossible to read poetry on an eReader (unless the form of the lines doesn’t matter, in which case … well, why read poetry at all?). I’m with you on books with excessively small type or vertically compressed spacing. They’re surely for younger eyes than mine!
Interesting but I’m not sure I agree—not that I’m the best test subject, mind—about the difference in levels of retention. I’ve just written to Canongate and told them to send all future review copies as e-books, a step I took with some reluctance because I love possessing books. There are levels to bibliophilia as with any love. Had I the funds I would be happy to buy books I never intended—or, shall we say, expected—ever to read, simply to own the books. I likewise get a kick from being in rooms full of books where there’s no possibility of me being able to read any of them. There’s the love of reading which most people would call bibliophilia but I think legerophilia (from the Latin ‘legere’) would probably be a more appropriate term. I struggle with paperbacks these days, the greyish paper and the smallish print. But with my various e-book readers—I have three different ones I use—I can adjust everything—colours, size, spacing, font—and it really makes the task so much easier and pleasurable. The one thing I miss is the ability to see how many pages I have left in the chapter I’m reading and none of them seem to get the page count right either but I suppose the technology will improve in time. E-books are here to stay. They’re an inevitability and a practical necessity. I suppose we’ll hang onto the term ‘book’ for a while yet just as we talk about writing when the reality is that most of us type and I still talk about taping TV programmes even though I’ve been recording them digitally for years now. I do not like the Kindle though. I have one simply because my wife bought it for me—she has her own and love it—but it’s not very flexible, besides my tablet is bigger.
A few years ago, I gave a copy of one of Mary Oliver’s books to a neighbor of mine as a birthday gift. In her thank-you note she said, “I will take my time with these poems. Speed cannot absorb.”
E-books are fine for traveling and for allowing people with sight problems to be able to enlarge the type enough to read the books they want, but I tried the Kindle for about a year and am back to reading books that I can touch, smell, know what page I’m on, etc.