Burning the Page: The eBook Revolution and the Future of Reading

I’ve learned a number of things about the nature of reading and e-reading that are essential to understanding where we are in these early stages of the ebook revolution and how much further the revolution needs to go to be truly successful.

First and foremost, e-readers don’t hold a melted candle to print books in terms of how crisp and textured their ebooks can be.

When I look at my favorite print books from a tactile perspective, I’m drawn to my childhood Bible, with its thin, translucent onionskin pages like starched Kleenexes. Or my Boy Scout manual with its curiously dated but somehow reassuring 1970s color palette. Or my pulp science-fiction magazines from the 1930s with their brittle, yellowed pages that flake if you turn them too fast and have a texture surprisingly like fiberglass.

The current displays for e-readers are too primitive to adequately convey texture. There’s something artistic about eInk, about the almost-random accumulation of tiny titanium dioxide balls in a bath of black ink. But eInk does not produce a warm texture. It’s not soft and reassuring like a weathered, slightly scruffy page from an old book. And I can see how poorly an ebook’s text mimics the type in a print book. Even seen under a magnifying glass, the type is too pixelated.

No e-reader is able to match the resolution of reality. At best, current eInk readers are able to show 200 dots per inch of resolution, but that’s paltry when you consider that even the most mediocre of mass-market books is printed at 300 dots per inch, and photography and art books commonly have two or four times as much texture. If you’re on the side of print books, I agree with you on this one. They win on texture, and ebooks still have a long way to go.

There’s also a solidity to print books that lends itself well to the gravitas of the ideas expressed within or to the solidness of the story. Moreover, the sense of touch—of pages that are perhaps rough or smooth or crisp or corrugated—gives readers an anchor, continually re-establishes a link between the book and the reading experience, and prevents the mind from wandering while reading. The physicality of a book anchors you to it, unlike the denuded, sterile sensation of sheer plastic or numb glass on an e-reader.

Your brain is aware of this too.

In the brain, reading is as much a sausage factory as the ebook conversion process is. As long as the sausage factory doesn’t get choked up, you’re able to read each word sequentially. You chunk these words together from your storehouse of understanding about semantic meanings, syntax, and grammatical structures. And as your eyes race ahead to the next word or backtrack a bit to reaffirm what they just read, you have time to think and ponder, to come up with ideas of what the book is about and what you’re reading. In other words, to make sense of it.

How does reading work biologically? In a nutshell—and the brain is shaped like a kind of walnutty nutshell, after all—your parietal lobe disengages you from what you were just doing to draw your attention to the words. Your midbrain moves your eye along them, and your thalamus focuses your attention on each letter or word that you’re reading. From within the cingulate gyrus, your eyes are directed to each of the words, and then your brain checks to see if the word you’re reading is familiar or comprehensible.

Just as a web browser caches parts of a website for faster access later, your brain does the same thing for words. There are caches of visual word-forms for your reference in the part of the brain called area 37 of your occipital-temporal region. Your temporal lobe then translates these symbols into sounds, and the anterior gyrus in the back of your head converts these sounds into your interior monologue, the voice you hear inside your head. Your left temporal lobe and right cerebellum and Broca’s area are all brought to bear on making meaning out of this flow of sounds.

It’s a complex sausage factory that fits inside your skull, and it moves swiftly, taking no more than 100 milliseconds per word and often less, as long as nothing gets in the way. As long as there are no distractions like strange flickers or ghosts, what you see on an e-reader is just as meaningful to your inner monologue as what you read in a printed book.

Okay, that was all very technical. So let me emphasize the important thing: there’s no cognitive difference in reading a sentence in a print book versus a digital book.

However, there’s more to a book than the sentences inside it. After a lifetime of habitual reading, your brain is used to considering the whole page of a book in its entirety. Your brain is used to having a dialogue, if you will, with the typographer and page layout artist of the book you’re reading. That’s why the occasional use of a new font or a drop-cap—or heck, even an italicized word—helps you stay focused. It keeps your brain from yawning and switching to something else. With e-readers, though, this dialogue often stutters. The digital page is often bereft of nuance, of any anchor besides a list of monotonously formatted words, like plain black beads on an invisible string.

When you talk to neuroscientists about how the brain works, they’ll tell you that a book is meaningless if you don’t actively engage with it. That’s why poets use unexpected word combinations, or why Friedrich Nietzsche used irony, or why David Foster Wallace used footnotes. These touches disorient you as you read, forcing you to put 10.5 watts of energy into the reading process to actually focus on what you’re reading. Why did I say 10.5 watts? It could have been any number, but it was unexpected. It got your attention, and you’re more likely to remember this passage now than you would have been if I wrote it in a dry, journalistic way without any memorable facts to catch your attention.

There’s something important and touching about the palpable physical presence of a book: it engages the senses. In this way, the act of turning pages helps to anchor information, because we have a visual, geometric sense of where one page is in relation to all the others in a book, a tactile dog-eared map. This is something we lose with e-readers. We’re used to processing a 3D world around us in everyday life, and while many e-readers have built-in progress meters to show you where you are within a book, they’re often insufficient.

Such 2D progress meters require some mental agility to use. They’re no better than gas meters on a car, which show you’re halfway through a tank but don’t tell you how many miles or gallons you have to go until empty. By comparison, there’s no ignoring the handiness of the physical presence of a book as you hold it and the sense of achievement in knowing how far through it you’ve come.

With ebooks, we also lose the ability to flip back and forth quickly through pages, as we can in a print book. I can flip through perhaps a hundred pages per second in a print book as I look for a given passage, but even on the fastest iPad, I can only see about ten pages per second. Current e-readers are still ten times too slow to match print books in this respect.

So clearly, in some respects, print books are still superior to digital books. Just as we are what we eat, we are what we read. Literally. The act of reading changes the layout of the brain, rewiring it. The more your brain can engage with a book, the better the reading experience becomes, and the more you remember of what you read. And physical sensations—the texture of the paper, the smell of the ink, the raised or recessed letters on the book cover, a peeling price tag on the spine—all help center you in the reading experience and help distinguish one book from the next in your mind’s mental map.

That’s not to say that e-reading doesn’t have advantages, though. And one key advantage is the ability to store and link the books you read.

Some people take the time to meticulously write down and log each book they read, compiling a lifelong list of books that have influenced them. Digital books can not only enable all of us to keep such a list, but also help us do it better.

More than academic curiosity drives people to log the books they’ve read. In some ways, it’s an intimate journal of your mental development. It gives you a ready way to look back on yourself as you were or to retrace ideas to their origins. It may even serve as a memory aid if you’re searching for a book you know you once read but subsequently forgot. Also, the act of creating this history helps solidify what you read and anchor it in your mind. It’s like you’ve clicked the Save icon on your word processor and are more likely to recall more of what you read because you saved it to memory.

Ebooks could enable this history automatically for everyone, no effort needed. All it will take is one retailer—say, Barnes & Noble—to add a feature to the Nook that creates a website with a reading history of every Nook book you’ve read. Every time you buy a new book, it would add to that list, and you could share it with friends and brag about the books you’ve read.

But I think the biggest boon that digital reading can give us is improved contact between people through better social connections. Reading is often a private experience, and current digital books encourage readers toward even more privacy by allowing them to interact with buttons and joysticks, with toggles and keyboards, instead of directly with other people. It’s so much easier to tweet a passage in an ebook we read than to call someone up and talk about it. Digital books are in some ways hastening the lazy, solipsistic narcissism of our culture. We use our gadgets as proxies for other people and genuine human interaction. And yes, I think that’s bad.

As a species, we seem to be designed for social interaction, so taking that away leads to problems. For example, research has shown that staying socially engaged keeps a brain vital and fit. A 2001 study published by the American Academy of Neurology found that a healthy social life may cut the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by up to 38 percent. Ebooks alone aren’t responsible for reducing the quality of our social interactions—we have telephones and chat windows and Facebook feeds to “thank” for this as well—but clearly, e-reading doesn’t have to be antisocial.

However, the reading experience can change in the future. It can let you bring your friends or family into the book as you’re reading it. Digital books have the promise of giving you the choice, in the moment, of making reading public or private, depending on your mood.

I’ll give some examples of these possibilities later in the book. But I want to pause here and agree with print-book lovers out there, because yes, you’re right. Digital books aren’t quite the same as print books.

Not yet.

Bookmark: Love Letters Preserved Between Pages

Feeling nostalgic for print books today, I opened some of mine at random and looked through them. Here’s a catalog of interesting bits of stuff I found trapped between the pages:

• A W-2 tax and wage statement from my first job.

• A note from my best friend, torn from a wall calendar dated June 26, 1993, with a note saying, “Jason, come visit!”

• A Calvin and Hobbes cartoon my dad mailed me when I was in college.

• Petals from a pear tree I once had outside my apartment in Ohio.

• A record for a Dungeons & Dragons character I once had in junior high (magician, level ten).

• A fax I received on the day my grandfather died.

• Three Chinese coins my mother once gave me.

• A love letter from a former girlfriend.

• A butterfly wing, either carefully preserved or accidentally torn.

The catalog could go on and on. Anyone who knows me will attest to the fact that I’m a collector of useless and sentimental things. My wallet bulges not with cash but with receipts and ticket stubs that I’m too sentimental to toss aside. The result is that my wallet grows larger every month and needs to be held together by too many rubber bands. It won’t even fit into my pocket anymore, which kind of defeats the purpose.

I have a habit of stuffing receipts and letters into anything I can find, books not excepted. I leave these trinket collections and stashes of papers behind as bits of myself from former eras. I stuff them into desk drawers and cardboard boxes and wallets and, best of all, books, because there are so many of them in my house. It’s as if I’m able to animate the books with my personality, somehow. Maybe I’m a bit pathological in this sense, compared to most people. But books are like waystations in my life, not just in terms of what they taught me, but what they in turn recollect of me, what bits of myself they hold between their pages. There’s a capsule history of my life preserved between the pages of my books.

It’s a surprising find, and I’d venture to say that everyone with enough books has something similar pressed between the pages of their own books. Such capsule histories comprised of love letters and faded faxes can only be contained by our print books and not by digital ones. Books that I’ve stuffed with flyers and pamphlets and notes I’ve jotted on postcards serve as time capsules. They’re part of my identity. My identity is not—and hopefully never will be—emotionally aligned with a clean, sleek, soulless plastic device.

In this sense, ebooks are useless.

But now that I’m moving away from print books and toward ebooks, perhaps this is a blessing in disguise. I can reassess whether I even need to store my personal trinkets, my bits of stuff. Maybe it would be best if I simply bought a digital scanner and scanned them. That way, they could coexist with my ebooks on my hard drive and follow me forever, a digital shrine to three Chinese coins and a torn butterfly wing.

But I suspect that something will get lost in translation if these trinkets move from physical to digital. We’ll lose the feeling of unexpected discovery. We’ll also lose context. Why, for example, was a certain love letter placed inside a specific book? We’ll lose something of the ineffable mystery of our lives. But what do you think? I’d like to hear what you have found preserved between the pages of your family’s books.