The other day I read James Joyce’s short story “Araby” on my iPod Touch. The first time I read it, I was 15. I was in a high school English class taking in the words from the grimy printed page of a hand-me-down textbook — one with “J LOVES P” scrawled on the page ends. And now, as a post-teenager, I’ve taken it in again, this time in a café on the screen of a portable device.
One of the main differences? The printed page is bigger than the screen — on the iPod, I am encouraged to take in “Araby” in small gulps, a hundred or so words at a time, due to screen size and font size (the bigger it is, the less I squint, which is a good thing). On the page, however, my perspective is wider: I can see the printed landscape of the story unfolding, foreseeing phrases like “I lingered before her stall” lying in the paragraph breaks ahead.
This idea of certain technological mediums breaking things into smaller bits is intriguing to me — not just in the amount of text presented on something like an iPod or a Twitter feed, but in our conceptions of time being broken down into smaller and smaller portions. I noticed that, in the short minutes taken waiting in line at Cafe Ambrosia to order a medium Chai Bomb, I could quickly boot up my iPod Touch and check my e-mail (WiFi permitting) or, instead, read a “page” of “Araby” in its entirety.
The idea of time management has changed, as a short period of time can now be given to what we’d like to call “productivity,” or this constant imbibing of information in tiny sips from portable devices like Blackberries or iPhones. I recently talked to a friend of a friend, who mentioned that she got the newsflash of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize on her phone at around 6 a.m. the day of the announcement. In that usually groggy-eyed, hazy-minded, hallucinatory minute one takes to brush one’s teeth in the morning, I presume she was catching up on current events that occurred between midnight and wakefulness.
This idea of smaller, productive chunks of time is something that can be applied directly to e-books themselves. This past weekend I attended the Future of the Book Symposium, which was hosted by the University’s Clements Library, the U-M Special Libraries Association and the School of Information. It was at this conference that I came to see various panelists’ perspectives on the life, or death, or neither, of books.
Mary Sauer-Games, the vice president and head of Higher Education Publishing for ProQuest LLC (the online research-oriented database compiling vast quantities of scholarly information), brought up an interesting point during her lecture: E-books are, in fact, being used differently than paper books.
The research she presented by the Joint Information Systems Committee, which is devoted to studying the effects and usage of the e-book, was somewhat expected from personal experience, but the numbers were still surprising. Based on surveys completed by 22,437 people between Jan. 2008 and summer 2009, of the 12,014 who did read e-books, 54.7 percent admitted that they “dipped in and out of several chapters” when they read the texts online.
This means that more than half of those surveyed have been skimming e-books, which presents some insight into the usage of the book itself: These digital books are not necessarily being read cover-to-cover (so to speak) for an immersive experience, but being used to provide an extractive experience — one where readers use e-books to quickly find and collect information. It seems like even books themselves now are bending to our wills and our free time, providing us the resources we need when we need them. All of this is contrasted with the fact that, pre-Internet, one had to bend one’s self (walking through the snow to the library) and one’s time (writing away several hours of the weekend to stay there and study) to the gathering of information.
So maybe e-books, for now, are fulfilling a different utilitarian niche for book readers, providing a subtle but noticeably different experience from the paper page. As with a lot of technologies, including blogs and Twitter, we have become accustomed to using technology as a means of connecting us quickly with mass amounts of the information we want. But at times we care more for quantity of information than the depth of that information.
Joyce’s “Araby” still remains an immersive work of literature, even on my iPod at Cafe Ambrosia, with its vivid images of the fair and the cold autumn evening, but as an e-text, it was a world that filled in the gaps of my time, where the unfolding story was interrupted by a barista handing me a stout mug of spiced chai. Perhaps the role of technology today is to provide us with what we want quickly. And perhaps the paper book, in its antiquity, still carries connotations of a time where we would diligently set aside time to let the book take us to places, instead of the other way around.