E-Books vs. Physical Books - Part 4

I hope this is the last post I write on this subject since I'm starting to sound like a broken record. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

The bottom line is that our brains function differently when we read physical books than when we are reading on a screen. We concentrate better and remember more of what we read when using physical books.

The source of many of the articles I've read on this subject has been Canadian pastor Tim Challies. So you can imagine my surprise when he recently declared he was going "all in" with digital books.

I agree with many of his reasons for preferring digital books (convenience, less clutter, etc.), but can't believe he's ignoring the negatives that he himself has pointed out to his readers. I say, let's keep a balance.

I'm glad Edie at Life In Grace wrote this post about the importance of physical books. I had heard the argument about having books around so that your children will be able to see what influences you (see Our Bare Shelves, Our Selves). But Edie's argument about book time being the perfect antidote to screen overdose is excellent.

What do you think? Am I a lone voice crying in the wilderness?

Are You Bi-Literate?

Tim Challies linked to an interesting article on how the internet has made most of us "skimmers" vs. readers. (The follow-up article was on how most people just skimmed the first article.) The passages in italics are from the original post.

Claire Handscombe relates that since she quickly reads through e-mails and blog posts, she now has difficulty reading normal books. I have noticed this tendency in myself. My new attention span for a book is about an hour. After that I really have to push myself.

To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe's experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through torrents of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia...

Maryanne Wolf, one of the world's foremost experts on the study of reading was startled last year to discover her brain was apparently adapting, too. After a day of scrolling through the Web, she sat down to read Herman Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game." "I'm not kidding: I couldn't do it," she said. "It was torture getting through the first page..."

Wolf's next book will look at what the digital world is doing to the brain, including looking at brain-scan data as people read both online and in print. She is particularly interested in comprehension results in screen vs. print reading...

Researchers say that the differences between text and screen reading should be studied more thoroughly and that the differences should be dealt with in education, particularly with school-aged children. There are advantages to both ways of reading. There is potential for a bi-literate brain. "We can't turn back," Wolf said. "We should be simultaneously reading to children from books, giving them print, helping them learn this slower mode, and at the same time steadily increasing their immersion into the technological, digital age. It's both." 

I'd like to make just a couple of comments: First, I think skimming is absolutely essential in this age of information overload. I learned this skill way back in the 1980's so that I wouldn't waste time on non-essential information while doing research papers. Skimming is not a bad thing. What worries me is that our brains are becoming re-wired to want/tolerate only small bites of information.

Second, the idea that we have to steadily increase our children's immersion into the technological, digital age is ridiculous. It's already a stampeding horse, that's dragging our kids away from healthy times of imaginitive play and quiet reflection. If anything, we have to look for ways to decrease their immersion.

It looks like it's going to take a lot of determination to be bi-literate, but I'm up for the challenge. What about you? Do you struggle with this too?






 

E-Books vs. Physical Books - Part One

Tim Challies had a link to a New York Times article on how e-readers have yet to match up to regular books.  It's a bit lengthy, but quite insightful.

I admit it.  I have become emotionally dependent on my e-reader because of my book addiction and the fact that I have very little access to books in English in our new location.  But sometimes I desperately miss the maneuverability of physical books, the ability to flip back to favorite passages without laborious clicking.  And as someone else has said, "You never look at an e-book with quite the same emotion and love as you do a dog-eared novel that you've read a dozen times."

In my post on Moonwalking with Einstein, I cited Joshua Foer's argument that moving from scrolls to books  took away the necessity of being completely familiar with the text.  It made us lazier readers.  Yet Lev Grossman (in the NY Times article) contends that moving from scroll to book (codex) was an amazing advancement.

The codex also came with a fringe benefit: It created a very different reading experience. With a scroll you could only trudge through texts the long way, linearly. With a codex, for the first time, you could jump to any point in a text instantly, nonlinearly. You could flip back and forth between two pages and even study them both at once. You could cross-check passages and compare them and bookmark them. You could skim, if you were bored, and jump back ro reread your favorite parts. It was the paper equivalent of random-access memory, and it must have been almost supernaturally empowering.

Yes, yes, yes, that's what I miss about reading "real" books!  That's why I'll never be able to do indepth Bible study on my Kindle.  It just doesn't allow for it.