Well, now we know why Amazon had the big promotion last month; they wanted lots of customers to buy one before the iPad was released. From what I saw of it on TV, the iPad is very gorgeous and user-friendly as Apple stuff always is, but of course it’s much more expensive. The simple touch page-turning of the iPad does look very nice, but it’s also bigger and heavier than the Kindle. Not so handbag-friendly maybe.
However, I suspect that turning a page on an iPad will take just as much getting used to, as it does on the Kindle…
It’s not so much the page turning method being different, as the timing of it… I’ve had to teach myself to do it sooner as well as differently. If you’re an experienced reader, you’ll have learned to turn the page before you’ve read the last few words on a page. Skilled readers predict text before they see it and you can in fact omit a ………. and the skilled reader will predict what it should be. You can even omit whole phrases and the ………….. ……………… can still read the sentence without even missing a beat. Sometimes skilled readers can skip whole chunks of text because they’ve predicted the content of most of the paragraphs, as for instance, if I wrote this:
I’m a very keen reader of 19th century British classics. I began reading Austen and Dickens as a teenager, and went on to to read most of …………………., ……………….. ,…………………….. ,………………………….. ,………………………….. , before I was twenty.
You don’t even need to know me to predict that the list would include the Brontes, Trollope, Hardy, George Eliot, Thackeray etc. The eyes of an experienced reader would dance over that text picking up just the initial letters to confirm what they’re expecting to see and would only pause, disconcerted, if the list included Dr Seuss or Dan Brown.
Reading on a Kindle has made me look more closely at my own reading behaviour. It varies of course, according to the text I’m reading but I tend to have my finger ready to turn the page at the beginning of the last paragraph of the page, and I actually turn it half way through the last line if it’s a complex text or on the 2nd or 3rd last line – and sometimes sooner than that – if it’s something more predictable. But the Kindle turns pages more slowly than I do, so if I leave it as late as I usually do there’s an annoying pause while the Kindle catches up with my brain – I have to wait for the next page to load.
Not only that, the Kindle screen with the same sort of font size as most of the books I read has less words per line and per page than most of the books I read. This means not only that I turn the pages of the Kindle more often, but also I need to turn the page well before the last line of text. It’s a slight modification of my usual reading behaviour, but I’m getting the hang of it.
A single charge is supposed to last for about a week, but I have yet to find out what that means in practice. Does that mean a normal person who reads for half an hour a day will get 7 days reading from a single charge or that a gluttonous reader like me can (in the holidays) read nearly all day long and into the night as well for 7 days? I bet not. And I don’t want to find out in the middle of the night and have to get up, boot up the computer and then plug the thing in so that I can keep reading!
Anyway, I now have 60 titles, all of them free, (thank you, Steven!) except The Boat by Nam Le which cost me $13.74 AUD from Amazon, and for $13.68 AUD At Swim Two Birds (which I stumbled across and have been looking out for, for ages). It is quite breathtaking to press one button on the website and have the book in the Kindle less than 60 secs later, I can tell you! It’s also a remarkable difference in price, but there’s more to buying a book than price. Buying an eBook means there’s no book on my shelf, and I really like to have my books about me. That’s why I have my own library. I like books, not just reading them.
Not only that, I also miss the cover art, and the sensory experience of the weight of the book shifting from right to left as I read on through the book. There is no sense of making progress through the book at all actually, though there’s a dorky little graph at the bottom footer that tells you what percentage of the book you’ve read. There’s no page numbers either, so I don’t know what you’re supposed to do if you quote from it…the footer has ‘location’ numbers e.g. 632-40 but I don’t know what they refer to – they’re not page, line or paragraph numbers. There’s also a 4 digit number on the RHS which seems not to change as you read along – I have no idea what that is either. This lack of page numbers could be a bit of problem for students who are expected to cite page references…
As for reading something like Ulysses where you need to flick back and forth to cross-reference things, well, the Kindle would be useless. I don’t know about other readers, but for a short while after I’ve read something, I can often remember the exact position of particular bits of text on the page, and can find them immediately if I want to. I don’t have my Ulysses in front of me, but I can tell you right now that in my edition, that the mad catalogue of characters in the Hue-and-Cry from Circe is on the bottom half of the RHS and it’s in italics. And even without a bookmark, I know by feel roughly where the page will be as well. I have a sort of sensory memory of the respective weights of the left/right pages in my hands, so I know it’s about 3/4 of the way through. (Pause, go and get it, check, yes, that’s right, found in less than 30 seconds, it’s on p519) . I couldn’t do that on a Kindle, and that would make reading a lot of postmodern literature impossible.
And as for poetry, where the space around the words is as important as the words themselves, the Kindle would be horrible, all wrong, just thinking about reading The Iliad on a Kindle gives me the creeps. Like instant coffee instead of a real Italian macchiato!
So I’m coming to the conclusion that my initial thoughts were correct: the Kindle will be fantastic for travel, and good for hard to find out-of-print books. Maybe for something I want right now for some reason. But for my favourite authors, I want the real book to have and to hold, to be part of my collection, and to browse through.
Oh yes, I nearly forgot. I’ve tried reading in bed, and it’s ok apart from the mild anxiety when I start to nod off, but wake up with a start when the Kindle is about to slide off onto the floor!
Dear Lisa,
I have effectively read Ulysses on my Kindle–bookmarks make flipping back and forth relatively hassle free, so it can be done and if you travel a lot, it’s a lot less bulk to carry than to carry ANY paper version of Ulysses.
You just make the adaptations necessary to use the medium effectively. Also–Kindle produces a “concordance” of the books loaded–when the number of books is small–the index can be tremendously useful.
shalom,
Steven
By: Steven Riddle on February 3, 2010
at 12:27 am
I understand how to use bookmarks, Steven, but how do you manage the situation where you don’t realise something is significant until after you’ve read on (what would be the equivalent of) say, 20 pages or so, and so you didn’t bookmark it at the time?
By: Lisa Hill on February 3, 2010
at 6:55 pm
I’ve never before read a description of how an experienced reader “decides” to begin the turning of a page and how it varies from book to book. Much in the same way that an experienced driver adapts to different weather and road conditions, as it turns out. And your description of remembering where on a page (as well as generally in the book) important, quotable sections are was equally good. Miss Watson taught me back in Grade Three (that was a long time ago) that we never, ever wrote in a book and I have never, ever done that since. As a blogger, that makes “page memory” an essential talent — and one that I am happy to possess.
Miss Watson also taught us how to “crease” a book so that the spine did not break. With every new book before you start reading, you gently fold back sections (working from both front and back towards the middle) in groups of 30-40 pages. It breaks my heart when I see readers destroying books by not “preparing” them like this before reading. And I raise the point because this is one issue that the Kindle certainly avoids. I don’t have one and won’t need one, but I do appreciate reading about your experience. Please keep us up to date on further discoveries.
By: KevinfromCanada on February 3, 2010
at 1:52 am
Ah, Kevin, you have a Miss Watson, and I had a Mrs Sheedy. I wonder what they would think of us now, as bloggers? I would be very interested to know if other people also have page memory. Is it something we were born with, or did we learn it somehow? Lisa
By: Lisa Hill on February 3, 2010
at 7:00 pm
Thanks for this post, which is very informative on a personal level as you describe your experiences. I must admit, when I saw the ipad I was shocked that it was so big.
By: Fiona on February 3, 2010
at 12:25 pm
Yes, Fiona, I heard them talking it somewhere….along the lines of, ok you still have to have the phone, and you still have to have either the laptop or a desktop, and then you need the iPad as well…
By: Lisa Hill on February 3, 2010
at 6:56 pm
I’m sure Miss Watson would be very proud. Actually, the prof who taught me my first Canadian literature class is very proud, but that was some time on. And the fact that I was a newspaper editor who employed him on occasion to write book reviews might have had an impact. :-)
And I do hope others will comment on “page memory”. Until you raised the point in this post, I had never really realized that I experience a book not just in my mind, but with my hands and my eyes as well. Which is why the Everyman’s Library volumes are perfect for Mann, Zweig’s novellas want Pushkin Press treatment and my current re-reading of Salinger demands the original hardcover versions (which only have about 300 words per page).
By: KevinfromCanada on February 4, 2010
at 2:48 am
Kevin, I learn interesting new stuff about you all the time! What sort of newspaper was it?
By: Lisa Hill on February 4, 2010
at 8:22 pm
I started work at the Calgary Herald (the city’s dominant daily) as a reporter in 1969 and worked there for 26 years — was the publisher for the last seven and the senior editor for the 10 before that.
By: KevinfromCanada on February 5, 2010
at 2:13 am
I toyed with journalism as a career… Lisa
By: Lisa Hill on February 5, 2010
at 6:38 pm
Absolutely loved this post Lisa – both the comments on reading (and page memory) and the reflections on the Kindle. All grist for the mill.
I don’t think I read novels the way you describe – ie with fingers ready to turn the second I’ve anticipated, etc. I read mags and often non-fiction like this but I tend to read novels more slowly (well, most – the odd pageturner/light novel I read like that, but I read very few such books). At swim two birds, for example, I would have been hardpressed to see what was coming … I reckon if I omitted a few words in that one I’d have missed the point. The way I see it is that some of the “best” literature tends to involve the unexpected and so using traditional techniques might be ok for getting the plot but I think I would miss much else – the subtleties that can clue us to meaning, tone, etc? But, having read your post, I am going to try to analyse how I read a little more closely!!
Love the discussion here of handling books too – my daughter can’t bear a bent spine. She and I are quite anal about caring for our books but I’m trying to put it into perspective. I actually cover all my books – well my pbs anyhow – with contact. Not good for preservation but it does protect them when I lend them out and even when I carry them around myself in bags. I never bend corners, but I do write in them – in light lead pencil – both in the margins and at the back where I gather thoughts as I read re theme, style, characterisation etc.
By: whisperinggums on February 5, 2010
at 11:02 am
By gosh, I am enjoying all this. Started reading so I could get a better understanding of eBooks but I am learning so much more.
I certainly relate to the way you half-prepare yourself to turn the page. I do this well before hand because I cannot stand the slightest pause, like if the pages stick momentarily or something.
I’m moving on. I want to read all these Kindle posts!
By: Karen lee Thompson on May 27, 2010
at 7:20 pm