I finally got an e-book reader three weeks ago (um, yes, a Kindle Touch). It’s taken me a long time to choose one basically because I find the screens which e-book readers are equipped with too small in all cases. I guess the idea is that their overall size reproduces that of a smallish paperback you can easily carry in your handbag but this makes the actual screen tiny. An I-Pad is not an option for me, as its bright screen makes reading far more tiring and, well, it’s also too big to carry comfortably in my several bags as they remain unfashionably small.
I think Virginia Woolf was the one who said that when we start a book the first thing we do is check how many pages it has (I do worse things, such as reading the ending, don’t ask me why, too long to explain). I supposed she meant we assess the effort which reading that particular volume will entail. So far, this is what I miss most in my e-book reading practice. I’m getting used very slowly to the idea that instead of pages the Kindle screen announces the percentage of the text I have read so far. Also, the uniformity of the text is quite mindboggling as, logically, the specifics of each edition are lost (yes, yes, I know I can customize the text but that’s not my point). I’m just a novice e-book reader and there’s, as you can see, little I can say, perhaps I’ll add that Project Gutenberg has become my latest addiction. No, I haven’t bought anything yet –actually, no e-book reader around me seems to be buying any e-books.
The odd thing is that I use my Kindle horizontally from day one, which means that I read roughly the equivalent of half a conventional page with every touch. I’m sure this has to do with the size-matters problem I mentioned and clearly indicates that possibly 8 inches and not 6 would be the ideal screen size (an I-Pad has a 9.7 inch screen). I’m just saying a very obvious thing if I mention that what I enjoy about the e-book reader and dislike in computers is not just the comfort of the e-ink for my tired eyes but that I can avoid scrolling.
In one of the episodes of the BBC documentary series The Virtual Revolution (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n4j0r/episodes/guide) I heard an American lecturer (at Harvard?) argue that first-year students resist having to read books because they’re used to reading just short texts on the net and they don’t see the need for a book-long argumentation of any idea. In the same episode a British researcher demonstrated that we hardly ever read the complete contents of the webpages we check: we just skim through them. This is, precisely, the problem: scrolling results in superficial, partial reading –somehow we need pages to focus. The youngest raised on a diet of scrolling resist page-based reading (except, of course, the bookworms); we, the pre-internet diplodocus have brought pages back with a vengeance thanks to the e-book reader. So, it’s not so much, for me, a matter of paper vs. screen but a matter of scrolling vs. thumbing pages (whether physical or virtual). Thumbing wins, em, hands down.
What I don’t get about the e-book reader is the cult of the cover. I have no idea why people spend roughly 30% of the value of this high-tech gadget (129 euros) on an old-fashioned leather cover seemingly aimed at pretending the e-book reader is a paper book. My Kindle is for that reason still a domestic instrument, as I will not go for the absurd leather cover and will not squander silly money on an over-priced neoprene or cloth cover, which is all it takes. I have even considered making my own cover (yes, there are websites for that!). A friend carries her Kindle in a cute tiny folder with elastic binders and that seems to be plain sensible –though, believe it or not, a cute tiny folder is not that easy to find!
I never, ever thought this would be the main problem when owning an e-book reader… Suggestions welcome!!