Stephen Koch

Last Saturday, MIP (Most Important Person) and I had dinner with the psychiatrist and historian of science, George Makari  and his wife, Arabella, an art curator.The venue was the MIP’s and my our favorite neighborhood upscale watering hole, the splendid Centolire of Pino Luongo. Over a martini, I told George that I was reading his important twentieth-century history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Revolution in Mind.

He seemed delighted.

Then I told him that I had bought Revoltution in Mind as an e-book, and was reading it on a dedicated reader.

He was a little less delighted.

In the discussion that followed, we ran through some of Makari’s reservations about digital reading, and they deserve to be known.

To begin, George was once, as I was, a kid who was rescued from a hum-drum fate and given a glimpse of an exciting destiny through books. Real books. Books that, as Ray Bradbury says, that had a smell; books that weighted something. Updike once said that he wrote for a kid sitting at an oak table in a public library on a sunny Saturday afternoon, a kid who in that library quiet was feeling the top of his head blowing off. Well, I was once that kid. So was George. But will that indispensible experience be repeatable without the physical book? 

Second, what is going to happen to bookstores? They are closing: George gave me the statistics and described the grim scenes. For types like us, bookstores resemble sacred space: a place to go when you need reminding that life good and filled with possibilities. That life is it, in fact, very good, and filled with great possibilites.

George clinched the argument by asserting that reading itself is in decline, and cited (albeit vaguely) statistics prove it. I believe a new literacy is coming to supplement—not replace;  supplement—the literacy he and I grew up with. He mistrusts my optimism, and sees digital reading is just one more way our era is using electronics to shatter of sustained attention, a next unwelcome step in the erosion of skill and thought through mere information and endless distraction.

Which of us is right? I wish I knew.

How about digital reading of the newspaper?

I have the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal  delivered daily to both my door and to my Nook, so that after six weeks of digital reading, I can compare the paper-paper and the e-paper. And I conclude that the digital newspaper has enhanced my reading of the news.

But that may be just me. I have ADD, and though it is well-medicated, my daily paper is usually a daily adventure in distractibility. Headlines everywhere! Stories everywhere! My wandering ADD eye just won’t keep still. 

 We ADD types are wonderful beginners and not-so-wonderful finishers, and that goes for the paper, too.  My Times and Journal are daily romps through a bunch of scattered unfinished paragraphs and sparking, but not quite fired up interests. I never finish the print versions of the Times and  Journal. I abandon them, and walk away in a fog of semi-knowing.

The dedicated reader changes that, because it changes my focus. The e-paper presents me with a daily list of sections and stories, with their opening words. I am looking at a menu, not the whole delicious but uneatably-abundant smorgasbord spread before me on the breakfast table. And so I choose only what really interests me, And I ignore what doesn’t. 

Lo and behold! I find that on the reader I not only begin the news story. I finish it. Every time. And often reread it. What’s more, I get it. 

Blessed focus!

The downside? Well, my dedicated reader is terrible with pictures, and it is no substitute for the truly marvelous picture editing of the Times. (E-delivery to a desktop is much better in this respect.) And as a lifelong clipper of the paper, (it helps me focus), I wish my e-subscriptions came with a cut-and-paste function, or at least the highlight-and-note capacity that’s already there for e-books. But no.

Even so… two cheers for the digital newspaper! It leaves me better informed, and reading it soaks up much less of my time. I finish the Times and Journal now.

Well, I have taken one more step into the twenty-first century. I have a digital reader. (Mine is a Nook. But I could be talking here about any of them.)  I can’t let my own industry pass me by: the most recent royalty report from The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop shows that ten percent of reported retail sales were e-books!

So the MIP (Most Important Person) got my number once again when she gave me a kiss and handed me a Nook for Valentine’s Day. I have been using it for six weeks, and am ready to make a report. Several reports, in fact.

This is report number one, and it’s the simplest. I like digital reading. In fact, I like it very much. Moreover, I am doing a lot of it. I was born and raised in the pre-computer generation, so the gift I opened on Valentine’s Day felt rather futuristic, and a little spooky at first.  Those of us raised on Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World were trained to see the future as a threat to all that is best in people and culture. 

Six weeks later, the threat has vanished. Digital reading feels futuristic good, not futuristic bad. Writers! Cheer up! This is not the death of what we do! It is a revitaliation of the reading experinece, an expansion, splendid with possibility!  In future posts I’ll be talking about its good (and right, some not so good) effects, about how with it I read more, read with sharper focus, and—publishers note well—buy more books. 

Does it replace the printed book for me? Not even close. Does it supplement  the printed book? Very much so.  I am convinced that once this technology has been been assimilated, improved, and its possibilities grasped, it will the basis for a splendid new advance in literacy. 

More posts will be coming soon on my responses. For now, just one thought. If I were Warren Buffett, (and of course, Warren and I are just like two peas in a pod!), I’d be investing big-time in the supposedly dying publishing industry. Because a very strong digital wind is about to fill its sails.