Reading The Shallows as an ebook

As big a fan as I am of technology in general, I've had a skepticism of ebooks for quite some time. In some ways, this is clearly an irrational prejudice, since the vast, vast majority of the reading for pleasure I do takes place online in the form of news, blogs, and the like; and probably 75% of the academic-related reading I've done in the past 3 years or so has been in the form of PDF copies of articles. So it's safe to say that I don't have any inherent problem with reading off of a screen, but the idea of reading an entire book that way has never really sat comfortably with me. Although I don't read nearly as many books as I used to, the act of reading was a very substantial part of my childhood, and I have a pretty particular mental script for what the act of reading is like. Also, and this is not a small consideration, a big part of the enduring appeal of books is the ability to display them and/or loan them out. I feel the same way about DVDs (or Blu-Rays, if you will) - having a tangible collection has a way of transcending the category of "stuff" to become a reflection on your own character. It's possible and perhaps likely that my mind will change on this subject sooner or later. After all, I've pretty much accepted the idea that the digital file is the medium uber alles for music consumption.

Anyhow, despite my mistrust of ebooks, there is a lot of stuff that I'd like to read at a reduced cost and that I don't necessarily want to forever occupy volume alongside the rest of my worldly possessions. Case in point: The Shallows, Nick Carr's book-length expansion of his Atlantic essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", which I probably wouldn't consider paying hardcover retail for, but when I saw it on the Amazon Kindle store for 11 bucks, I figured I'd give it a go. Reading a cautionary polemic about technology in a digital format on a device designed expressly to promote all manners of networked consumption (my iPad, about which I may write more on a later date) had an appealing irony about it and seemed like a good test case for the ebook experience.

About both the book and the experience I can say this - good, but not great. The Shallows raises some good cautionary and exploratory points about the effects of the Internet on our attention spans and standards for intellectual engagement, but it suffers from the increasingly irritating problem of ignoring the commendable but modest explanatory achievements of the field of neuroscience in favor of the considerably sexier achievements that neuroscientists are perpetually saying they're about to make. I guess the subtitle "What the Internet Could Possibly, But May or May Not Be Doing To Our Brains" wouldn't have tested well. Also, there's a couple chapters about the history of reading technology that are perfectly serviceable but come across as kind of padding; I felt like Carr's thesis statement was strong enough and interesting enough to support an entire book without the extensive context that he builds in.

As far as the format goes, I went back and forth about how I felt about it, and I think that the duration of my reading sessions made a substantial difference in the experience. When I would spend 30-45 minutes reading, it felt pretty much like I was reading a book and I could mostly forget that it was all digital. When I spent 10-20 minutes reading, it felt quite a bit more like I had just begun reading a short article online, which was a bit strange to me. With a regular book, I'm usually able to pick up where I left off and get back into the text without much difficulty. On the iPad, it seemed to take longer to mentally re-establish the context of what I was reading when I left off. This is no doubt due to the fact that I've taken to doing a substantial portion of my Internet browsing on the iPad, which is similar in form to reading a book but very different in terms of duration of attention (as discussed capably by Carr in the book), so it may be a matter of rewiring that expectancy.

Another thing that bothered my more than I thought it would - there's no page numbers on an ebook, at least not in the format that they're vended in the Kindle store. This threw me because I'm used to PDF files, which are usually digitized versions of a paper proof, complete with page numbers and everything else the physical copy has. In the Kindle book, there's just a progress bar and an indicator of what "section" you're currently in. I get that page numbers aren't workable in a format where you can increase or decrease the size and number of words on the viewable portion of the page, but I'm used to regulating my reading by page numbers. Without them, and without the physical heft of the book, I had a tough time telling how far I was into the text, and I was kind of surprised when I finished - based on the progress bar, I figured I had another chapter to go (there's an extensive amount of footnotes, but on a digital copy, you're less prone to flip to the back end than you would be in an actual book).

Overall, I'd say that the ebook certainly has its place; it's sort of a thrill to pay ten bucks and be reading a full length book without getting off the couch. I enjoyed reading The Shallows despite some of the strangeness, and I wouldn't mind downloading another book to read in the same fashion - in fact, I wish I had one to read before bed tonight. I could see the Kindle store becoming a go-to source of impulse purchases, which is OK - very few of the Kindle books I've seen are that expensive, and risk taking with books is something that often pays good dividends. However, I don't see myself buying digital versions of things that I'm particularly excited to read and certainly not professional materials, at least not yet.

A Few Words About Halo: Reach

Above: Me, earlier this evening, pulling off one of the sweet new Assassination moves on some guy online.

Halo: Reach has been out for almost exactly two months, a modest span of time in which I have managed to devote comfortably over 100 hours to playing it. Yes, really. I'm stating that from the outset not to brag about the fact that some 4 and an half days of my life, which might have been applied toward any manner of personal or professional advancement in a not inconsiderably critical developmental period, have instead been spent in front of the 360, but rather to establish that Halo: Reach is a really good game. I had an inkling of this going in, from my experience with the multiplayer beta (chronicled here), but the extent to which Reach has become a staple of my nights poses an interesting question: why the hell do I still care about Halo?

After all, it's not incredibly different from the four Halo games that preceded it; there's a lot of tweaks, fine-tuning, and loving care put into the game, but that all really adds up to more of a refinement of the hallmarks of the franchise than any sort of reinvention. If anything, Reach deliberately sets out to evoke the first Halo and strips away quite a few of the added features of the sequels. It works brilliantly, even when it really shouldn't.

Here's why: as a franchise, Halo understands that video games as a form live and die by their controls. After you've played a Halo game for a few hours, the controls are about as natural as breathing; and moving to the latest incarnation rarely requires you to learn more than one or two new changes, which are characteristically more intuitive that what they are replacing. (Incidentally, the decision to break with tradition by remapping the melee button from B to right bumper in Reach was a stroke of genius that almost reinvents the game). When you're playing Halo, everything you could possibly want or need to do - shoot, toss a grenade, jump, pistol-whip, etc. - is a single button-press away. The ridiculous number of effective techniques and attack options underneath the essential simplicity of the control scheme means that you start to develop a personal style pretty quickly, which you are rarely punished for doing. Even hardcore skilled multiplayer Halo junkies vary widely in their favored tactics; there's not a whole lot of unfair advantages to be had.

In all the hours I've spent playing Reach and it's predecessors, I've never felt like there was one right way to play the game. The experience of playing Halo has always struck me as similar to a giant sandbox with a bunch of different toys that are all somehow fun in their own way; there's just this sort of tactile friendliness to the game that encourages that sort of engagement. Halo: Reach is the apex of the series because it takes the Halo mechanics and lets them be the endlessly reconfigurable Rubik's Cube they always were: out of the box, you can choose to play the excellent single-player campaign alone or with friends, you can go online and play any one of a slew of competitive game-types, you can team up with other people in the Firefight mode, which throws waves of enemies at you and grafts on an arcade-style scoring mode, or you can come up with something completely unique using the Forge editor that comes with the game.

I think that more than anything else, Halo: Reach succeeds so wildly as a game because it invites you to have the experience that you want to have (as long as that experience involves shooting things, naturally, but if that's not your cup of tea, there's always reading). Since I've been playing it, it's been hard for me to really contemplate switching to another game; I may eventually pick up Call of Duty: Black Ops since it's getting good reviews, and there's those neat-looking Borderlands and Red Dead Redemption expansions, but I think it's going to take some time before Reach gets its hooks out of me.