As you probably know, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with electronic reading. I always swore I wouldn’t do it—until I did. Still, as time went on, I learned what I preferred to e-read, what I did not. I also learned there are differences in the way we interact with books and screens.
So has journalist-editor Paul Mason. Writing here for the Guardian, Mason notes that digital publishing has changed the way we read:
Our lives are already impossible without summarisation. Just as the first encyclopaedias were written in response to the problem of too many books, so we, too, have evolved new, instant reference tools.
Any word in an ebook can invoke its own dictionary definition, simply by selecting it. If a passage in an ebook strikes you as cogent, beautiful or profound you can bet – once you’ve switched the highlight-sharing function on – hundreds of other people have already highlighted it. It’s a short hop from realising that to paying special attention to the highlighted bits – not out of laziness but as a wise learning strategy.
But keep reading. Don’t skim. There’s more. 🙂
Readers have changed, yes—and writing is changing to meet readers where they are:
My guess is, if you scooped up every book – digital and analogue – being read on a typical Mediterranean beach, and cut out the absolute crap, you’d be left with three kinds of writing: first, “literary” novels with clearer plots and than their 20th century predecessors, less complex prose, fewer experiments with fragmented perception; second, popular novels with a high degree of writerly craft (making the edges of the first two categories hard to define); third, literary writing about reality – the confessional autobiography, the diary of a journalist, highly embroidered reportage about a legendary event.
This idea just bowls me over. Check it out.
Tweet: Readers have changed—& writing is changing to meet readers where they are.
Tweet: Digital publishing has changed the way we read—and what we read.
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