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.