The other day my friend Christy O’Flaherty posted a link to a roundtable discussion about print books versus e-books and started one of her own. As you know, I’ve given up the debate: I like my e-reader for certain very specific activities—traveling, waiting in lines, walking on the treadmill—and pretty much only for fiction. I have a tendency to mark my nonfiction books, to save passages, and I find that easier in a book with paper pages.

Christy, a dedicated reader who also works for a publisher, is a self-professed e-book convert. But even she notes that using an e-reader is a different reading experience than reading from a physical book:

One thing I’ve noticed that concerns me as a reader and a member of the publishing community is that I occasionally read an entire book and fail to imprint the author’s name, or sometimes even the book title, because I’m not looking at the cover on my nightstand for weeks. I just finished A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and couldn’t tell you the name of the author. I’m currently reading a book on Scientology and couldn’t tell you the title or author. I also wouldn’t recognize either from its cover art. This will surely have an impact on the way books and authors are promoted in the age of ebooks.*

I’d never even thought about this, but holy marketing, Batman! She’s right! (Further, on my second generation Kindle, screen size limits how much of the title/author’s name I see without specifically highlighting it.)

There’s a reason publishers spend thousands of dollars on book covers. In a retail environment (that is, a bookstore … and probably even at online retailers), the cover is the first and possibly most important marketing element to attract a browsing customer. We bookies have been known to fall in love with a book based on the cover art alone. 🙂

There’s a very strong visual component to book-buying and -reading, and it’s not just about covers. An article in the November 2013 Scientific American (“The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: Why Paper Still Beats Screens”), we learn about textual landscapes:

Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but some researchers think they are similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of indoor physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular passage in a book, they often remember where in the text it appeared. Much as we might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of a hiking trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennet at a dance on the bottom left corner of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than on-screen text. An open paper book presents a reader with two clearly defined domains—the left- and right-hand pages—and a total of eight corners with which to orient oneself. You can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing awareness of the whole text. You can even feel the thickness of the pages you have read in one hand and the pages you have yet to read in the other. Turning the page of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on a trail—there is a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled.**

Not to mention the visual convenience of page numbers. 🙂

Having read some about the development of the Kindle interface, I’m surprised this—the lack of a visual reinforcement in the form of a cover image—slipped by the R&D team at Amazon. (I’d be curious if they had any publishing people on that team, though.) Maybe they should hire Christy. She’s already got a solution:

You should be able to pull up the cover art at will; or the cover should come up first before you go to the page you were on. Instead of the ads the Kindle defaults to in rest mode, they should show the cover of the book you are reading, if you have one open.

Problem solved!

* Anthony Marra wrote A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. (I’ve reviewed it here.) The other book Christy mentions is Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright.

** There’s more on this subject in this article from Time (“Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read?”).

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”