Electric Vs Candlelight
You buy more books than you can ever get through in a year just because it's so damn easy.
You then diligently highlight your way through pages and pages of thoughtful sentences.
Then you stop for a minute and reflect on a pastime that has been lost. You can't quite put your finger on it but something is definitely missing.
Finally you work it out, eReaders have brought a new engagement experience to your life but they've stolen one in the process.
As Damian Barr captured in his great piece in Soho House's magazine, "I hate eBooks because they are not emotional". He goes on to capture one of the challenges I experience "My eyes dance across the screen randomly scanning instead of settling into a comforting rhythm".
I can't quite put my finger on it but after reading a number of books on the eReader - both Kindle and iPad - I have found myself reverting back to books. My reading really broadly falls in to two categories, 'with pen in hand' and 'without a pen'. The former can be a wide spread of subjects but the action of reading is invariably about capturing key thoughts and ideas. The latter is purely a pleasurable escape where a log fire and comfy armchair would be nirvana.
I've found, like Damian Barr, that reading fiction - 'without pen' - on the eReader lacks any emotional spark. It's almost like there's a filter that sits between me and the words and I just can't sink in to the story. On the 'with pen in hand' side, I just find the experience of eReading too slow. I like to power through, scribble notes and add lines down the side of paragraphs to highlight key elements. The eReader functions much better on the back end when you refer back to the highlights you've made but the process of getting there is too slow.
I'm excited about the future of eReaders and it's so interesting to see key tech people developing new reading experiences but for now I'm going to spend more time in candlelight - wait for the content of the book to catch up to the tool that delivers it. Then I will have to find time for this third form of reading.
I'll leave you with Damian Barr's concrete argument for the good old book "Nobody will ever fall in love with someone reading an eBook. They are not hot. Books send signals about who we are and who we dream of being or meeting. We can decode them. A sleek silver device says nothing".
