How Do E-Books Change the Reading Experience?

By MOHSIN HAMID and ANNA HOLMES

Published: December 31, 2013 

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Mohsin Hamid and Anna Holmes discuss how technology affects the way we read.

By Mohsin Hamid

In a world of intrusive technology, we must engage in a kind of struggle if we wish to sustain moments of solitude.

Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Mohsin Hamid

The advantages of e-books are clear. E-books are immediate. Sitting at home in Pakistan, I can read an intriguing review of a book, one not yet in stores here, and with the click of a button be reading that book in an instant. E-books are also incorporeal. While traveling, which I do frequently, I can bring along several volumes, weightless and indeed without volume, thereby enabling me to pack only a carry-on bag.

And yet the experience of reading e-books is not always satisfactory. Yes, it is possible to vary the size of the font, newly important to me at age 42, as I begin to perceive my eye muscles weakening. Yes, e-books can be read in the dark, self-illuminated, a reassuring feature when my wife is asleep and I am too lazy to leave our bed, or when electricity outages in Lahore have persisted for so long that our backup batteries are depleted. And yes, they offer more frequent indicators of progress, their click-forwards arriving at a rapidity that far exceeds that of paper-flipping, because pixelated screens tend to hold less data than printed pages and furthermore advance singly, not in two-sided pairs.

Nonetheless, often I prefer reading to e-reading. Or rather, given that the dominance of paper can no longer be assumed, p-reading to e-.

I think my reasons are related to the fact that I have disabled the browser on my mobile phone. I haven’t deleted it. Instead, I’ve used the restrictions feature in my phone’s operating system to hide the browser, requiring me to enter a code to expose and enable it. I can use the browser when I find it necessary to browse. But, for the most part, this setting serves as a reminder to question manufactured desires, to resist unless I have good cause.

Similarly, I have switched my email account from the attention- and battery-consuming “push” setting to the less frenzied manual one. Emails are fetched when I want them to be, which is not all that often. And the browser on my slender fruit-knife of a laptop now contains a readout that reminds (or is it warns?) me how much time I have spent online.

Time is our most precious currency. So it’s significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies.

I crave technology, connectivity. But I crave solitude too. As we enter the cyborg era, as we begin the physical shift to human-machine hybrid, there will be those who embrace this epochal change, happily swapping cranial space for built-in processors. There will be others who reject the new ways entirely, perhaps even waging holy war against them, with little chance — in the face of drones that operate autonomously while unconcerned shareholding populations post selfies and status updates — of success. And there will be people like me, with our powered exoskeletons left often in the closet, able to leap over buildings when the mood strikes us, but also prone to wandering naked and feeling the sand of a beach between our puny toes.

In a world of intrusive technology, we must engage in a kind of struggle if we wish to sustain moments of solitude. E-reading opens the door to distraction. It invites connectivity and clicking and purchasing. The closed network of a printed book, on the other hand, seems to offer greater serenity. It harks back to a pre-jacked-in age. Cloth, paper, ink: For these read helmet, cuirass, shield. They afford a degree of protection and make possible a less intermediated, less fractured experience. They guard our aloneness. That is why I love them, and why I read printed books still.

Mohsin Hamid is the author of three novels: “Moth Smoke,” a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” a New York Times best seller that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for film; and, most recently, “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.”

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By Anna Holmes

Who or what we choose to read can be as telling as the clothes we wear, and an e-book feels like a detail withheld, a secret kept.

Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Anna Holmes

When my second book was released this past October, I told anyone who would listen not to buy the electronic version.

This was not so much a dig at the publishing house production managers who converted my creation into e-book form as it was an acknowledgment of the medium’s many limitations. You see, no matter how fancy the refinements made to, say, Apple’s much heralded Retina display or Amazon’s electronic ink, an e-book offers little promise of discovery or wonder. Browsers may be ubiquitous in our e-portal age, but an e-book doesn’t encourage actual browsing.

This isn’t to say that I don’t read e-books. I do. (Mostly for research — love that search function!) But after close to half a decade of downloading and consuming any number of novels, autobiographies, comics and self-help titles in Kindle form, I have yet to feel as fully invested in the pixels on a Bezos-imagined screen as I do in the indelible glyphs found on good old-fashioned book paper.

Part of this has to do, of course, with the ways in which e-books are bundled with or experienced alongside other forms of entertainment. My iPad, for example, offers an experience not only with the written word, via the iBooks and Kindle apps, but with the moving picture, be it Netflix, Angry Birds or the mesmerizing Google Earth. Deep engagement with an e-book can therefore be quite challenging: It’s difficult to stay present with Colum McCann’s latest offering when the prose is competing for cognitive space with archived episodes of “Scandal.”

Interface is another issue. I prefer static page numbers over percentages. (I am not exaggerating when I say that the mutability of the progress bar at the bottom of every Kindle screen fills me with a specific and highly toxic combination of disorientation, obligation and dread.) Besides, physical, paperbound books provide a sense memory that has informed so many of my most important encounters with storytelling: sight, smell and touch, yes, but also the experience of anticipation, progress and accomplishment. Not to mention recollection. To call to mind a certain Toni Morrison book has as much to do with the care she took in crafting it as the physical sensation of reading it. Twenty-five years after I first read “Song of Solomon,” I still remember the exact location of a particularly devastating, gorgeous passage about the emotional violence inflicted by Macon Dead on his wife and daughters. (It was situated toward the beginning of the novel, at the bottom of a left-facing page.)

Lastly, I feel a certain disappointment in the electronic format’s performative limitations. Anyone who owns and enjoys books understands that the volumes we keep on our shelves — and in our hands on a busy subway — tell several stories. There’s the author’s story, which is the actual text; there’s the publisher’s story, which has to do with the choice of format and design; and, finally, there’s the reader’s story — what a particular book telegraphs about one’s education and tastes. Who or what we choose to read can be as telling as the clothes we wear, and an e-book feels like a detail withheld, even a secret kept. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it probably explains why the three books I own about dealing with a loved one’s alcoholism are on my Kindle, not my bookshelf.) Unlike the shopworn cover of an early paperback edition of “Native Son” or the crisp jacket on the latest Donna Tartt, Kindles and Nooks tell others little to nothing about their owners, except that they enjoy a certain amount of disposable income.

At the very least, physical books provide a convenient and visible distraction: What else are wallflowers at pretentious cocktail parties supposed to busy themselves with? Oh, right: their iPhones.

Anna Holmes has written for numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Salon, Harper’s, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker online. A 2012 recipient of the Mirror Award for Commentary, presented by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Journalism, she is the editor of two books: “Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters From the End of the Affair”; and “The Book of Jezebel,” based on the popular women’s Web site she created in 2007.

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