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

I can’t appreciate fiddle music. No matter how good it is, fiddle music sounds to me like someone plucking the guts of a sick cat. But I know, rationally, that there must be truly great fiddle players. My mind understands this, even if it can’t appreciate that kind of music.

Some things are simply matters of taste. Cilantro. Sushi. Cuban cigars. Krautrock. Spiders. There are no doubt items in this list that you find distasteful. And perhaps some that you appreciate, as a connoisseur might. Your taste for these is partly learned. In our country, we have developed an appreciation for sushi, for example, which is essentially raw fish. Spiders, by contrast, rarely make it onto the haute cuisine menus of our restaurants.

Culture is shifty, and as anyone who has traveled outside his or her home country knows, it can vary widely. And yet, some parts of culture are universal.

We all have an innate sense of storytelling, for example.

Whether you look at the oral culture of the Homeric Greeks, or the stories of the Navajo, or the stories of Jonathan Swift or Charles Dickens or any contemporary author, you’ll find that most stories deal with people. This should come as no surprise. As people, we care about other people. It’s part of our tribal ape heritage. It’s wired into us. We’re programmed by patterns in our own brains to care about people, to find them fascinating, and to see them even when they’re not present, like ghost lights in the dark.

As an example, consider pareidolia. It sounds like a disease, but it’s the surprisingly common tendency we have to see faces where none exist. And not just any faces—not bear faces or panda faces or fish faces—but the faces of people. We see them in whorls of wood and in the clouds overhead. There’s even a shrine to a tortilla in southern New Mexico. If you look hard enough at the tortilla, you can see the face of Jesus. We have triggers that fire when we see things that resemble faces. These triggers sometimes misfire, hence pareidolia. Looking for faces is clearly important to us because it’s biologically programmed.

Our sense of story is just as innate.

Good stories work well when they engage us in what we care about. Fiction does well when it paints a clear picture of a person, outfitting him with a camel-hair coat and a red beard. If the picture is too abstract, we don’t engage. Likewise, a cookbook will fail to make us salivate if it doesn’t have a photo of a pastry drizzled in chocolate sauce or a glistening sirloin steak cooked to perfection.

This preponderance of detail is what makes books work best. It takes a special kind of reader to enjoy Samuel Beckett and his abstract, disembodied fictions. We need details. Details resonate with us. Or, more properly, they resonate with our imaginations.

As far as I know, no clinician has isolated the imaginative faculty. It can’t be seen in any anatomy book. There are no brain labs at Harvard where rabbits are being vivisected to find the elusive imaginative faculty. It can’t be removed with forceps or pinned to a Styrofoam dissection tray. There are no crackpot scientists posting papers about the imaginative faculty in the pages of Nature or online sites like arXiv. The imaginative faculty cannot be bottled like a freakish two-headed snake in a bottle of ether at a carny sideshow. In fact, the imaginative faculty resists my own attempts to describe it, which is why I can only say what it isn’t.

But we all have this imaginative faculty. One theory for why we have this relies on evolutionary psychology, which offers explanations based on how our original human ancestors might have experienced life in the savannahs of Africa. If you believe in evolution, this theory might explain the imaginative faculty as an extension of being aware of predators and prey.

In the savannah, you would have to be alert to lions or tigers. You might imagine a tiger approaching if you heard a twig snap in the dark, and you’d react accordingly. Likewise, as a hunter, you would have to put yourself inside the head of your prey to capture it. You would have to think like a wildebeest, for example. Put yourself into her hooves. Anticipate how she might react, which rocks she might jump over, which trees she might try to hide behind.

In this sense, hunting requires storytelling. And because imagination is linked to our very survival—the ability to eat and the fear of being eaten—this faculty may have developed over time as an evolutionary adaptation, linked of course to our large brains.

However this faculty adapted, we can use it to put ourselves inside a really good book. Your second-grade teacher might have helped you to develop an appreciation for books, but it was always innate inside you. I would even bet you first discovered your imaginative faculty while reading a book when you were a kid. Perhaps it was a fantasy book about wizards of angelfire who fought dragons, or a comic book about Krypton or Eternia, or a story you imagined of Bible heroes flying through the sky.

The imaginative faculty is part of our human condition. We look for patterns and apply them to ourselves. We read a book and patch the details provided by the author together with those from the circumstances of our own lives. Whose face does the man in the red beard wear? Your mind fills the gaps with details from your own imagination. Perhaps you see the face of an old professor behind the red beard. An author doesn’t need to spell out all the details when he writes. He can rely on you, as a reader, to fill them in.

You patch these details in with your imaginative faculty, just as you sometimes see faces in knotted wood.

This faculty is innate, but it can be improved by training.

One doesn’t go straight from reading Dick and Jane books to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. But we do become gradually more voracious readers as our critical thinking skills improve and as we learn to look for nuance and ambiguity. We learn to crave details that get gradually more complex and characters that are less black and white. As for words, we come to crave the occasional neologism.

We crave, in fact, the fullness that experience itself can bring. And when we can’t get it from an author’s own words, we patch in our own experience. When you read a book of fiction, you use details from your own life to fill in the author’s missing gaps. You caulk the author’s stories with scraps from your own outlook and knowledge.

Reading demands a lot out of you. Out of all readers, in fact.

Sadly, reading rates are dropping, although existing readers are not giving up the reading habit. Once you’re a reader, you’re always a reader. What’s happening instead is that fewer people are developing the reading habit every year. It takes time for a child to develop this imaginative faculty to a point where it becomes rewarding. It takes time for the feedback loop to kick in. There are not enough new readers buying books every year, which is a matter of population dynamics. For a population to grow, there have to be more net births than deaths. Unless this decline is arrested, reading will decline.

I could stand on my soapbox on ten thousand street corners, talking about how important reading is, but it wouldn’t help. I could have my own TV show that teaches kids about reading, with LeVar Burton and Justin Bieber and a masked Mexican wrestler, and it still wouldn’t be enough.

I could airlift a million copies of Dick and Jane over the poorest part of Appalachia, the area with the country’s lowest literacy rates, but that wouldn’t help either. Against the onslaught of digital media, reading may decline to nothing more than a faded art form, neglected like ballroom dancing or Appalachian fiddle music.

In this sense, you might think that the future of reading is doomed. How can reading cope, given that movies and TV shows already provide a surfeit of details for us to work with? When you watch Star Wars, you don’t need to imagine what Darth Vader looks like under his mask; you can see each lurid scab on screen.

Likewise, video games don’t make the same demands on you as reading. Animators have crafted a whole world for you, along with computer-generated faces and professionally recorded voices. This makes it easier for you to experience the movie or TV show or video game, as your mind isn’t being taxed. But this is itself a drawback. If the imaginative faculty is seen as a kind of muscle that you flex inside your mind, then not using it may cause it to weaken and atrophy.

In some ways, this is a problem of philosophy. Does imagination matter?

If pre-imagined media experiences are what matter to you, then ebooks alone cannot compete against the onslaught of TV, movies, and video games.

Many ebooks are still mostly text, and the few experiments that attempt to hybridize movies and reading come off like tigers mated to killer whales. They’re like bestial monstrosities. Interesting as such experiments may be, the future of books does not lie in this direction.

No, the future for books is a return to the imaginative faculty, to the resonance between reader and author that causes the reader’s heart to flutter and his pulse to quicken, which causes him to sympathetically sweat when a zombie crashes onto the page or when a loved character is brutally murdered with a knife through the eye. Movies and TV and video games may win out in terms of production costs and special effects when compared to a humble book, but no movie yet made can let you into its world. Readers inhabit a book. They burrow into Frodo’s hobbit hole and curl up with him for a pot of tea. In contrast, the only way to “read” a video game or movie is when you are not participating in it.

As an example, I’m on an airplane now, heading back to Seattle. As I walk down the aisle to stretch my legs, I see plenty of Kindles. It sometimes seems like there are more Kindles on airplanes than Rollaboards. But even with all the Kindles and iPads, books seem to be outnumbered. On this airplane, at least, there are more laptops and video-game consoles, more people playing games and watching movies. The written word is outnumbered two to one.

When I return to my seat, the kid next to me is playing his video game. He’s utterly absorbed by the blinking dots, hunched over his game like Quasimodo and reacting to the electrons on his screen. It’s reactive. It’s a matter of stimulus and response. And I know this feeling well; I’m no stranger to video games. I know that when you’re absorbed in a game, it’s all-consuming.

But afterward, when the game is turned off, you can reflect, strategize your next steps, and plan ahead. It’s at such times that you really “read” a game. And likewise, the most voracious “readers” of a movie are the fans that obsess about it afterward, who imagine themselves as characters in the movie, or who buy books or director’s cut DVDs afterward to read into the nuances of the movie’s world.

I think this redefinition of “reading” bodes well for the future of books. But it means a shift in thinking. It means that any media experience can be “read” like a book, that there’s no preferential treatment of books over other forms of media, as long as the content is “read” with an active imagination. Because philosophically, I do think the imaginative faculty is important. I couldn’t live without it.

And I think that most of the successful people I know at Amazon, Apple, and Google, as well as among the publishers of the world, are those who are most creative, most imaginative. These are people who “read” into experiences, who don’t just talk to me about what was on TV last night but who imaginatively transplant themselves into the worlds of those TV shows. They’re the kind of people who wonder what it’s like to be a Cylon in Battlestar Galactica, who “read” into a media experience and apply it to their own lives, and who patch in details of the media with their own life experiences to personalize it.

I think any piece of media is capable of such a reading. A movie doesn’t have to be a classic like Citizen Kane. It could be anything, as long as you resonate with it and read into it with your imaginative faculty. Because books demand this form of reading, they’re here to stay for a long time in print or digital form—at least for that select group of people who enjoy imaginative reading.

For such people, books demand to be read. And they demand your attention. And paradoxically, because books by their nature aren’t as visually or auditorily rich as other forms of media, they engage our imaginations more strongly because of our need to patch in details. It’s a wonderful feedback loop: the more we read, the more we need to read and the less satisfied we are by entertainment that panders to our senses but deprives our imaginations. Once a reader is hooked, there’s no way to give up the habit.

As readers who are accustomed to the deep resonance we have come to enjoy when our imaginations are engaged, we’re hooked. And ultimately, because the imagination is so innate, no simple technological silver bullet can be applied to books or ebooks to make people read more. It doesn’t work that way. Reading—whether you’re reading a book or “reading” a movie—is a personal act of volition, of attention, of mindfulness. Reading comes from within. It takes energy. But it’s also so very rewarding. Reading is a gift that keeps giving.

At least, as long as you’re able to pay attention to what you’re reading.

Bookmark: Attention Spans

As retailers move toward tablets to let you consume all kinds of media, we’re finding that our focus often gets diluted and our attention spans get—what? What was I saying? Hold on, let me check my email and do a quick tweet.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve paid more than my fair share of dollars toward Apple’s billions in app sales. And I’ve done this with the drawback that when I do read on my iPad, I often find myself bouncing from the ebook application to the browser or to Facebook or a bunch of other applications. And the single-threaded reading experience that I get with dedicated e-readers or even print books is lost.

The reading I do on my iPad is more like snacking than eating a full meal. That wonderful faculty I have in my brain as I read, the way that my temporal and parietal lobes light up as I explore what-ifs and puzzle out the layers of meaning in the book I’m reading—well, on a tablet, those lights grow dim, and I lose focus. And I’m a fairly disciplined guy, so it’s not a matter of my own susceptibilities. These multifunction devices, which will be a core part of our future, engender a less focused mode of reading.

This is problematic, because as your mind wanders like a moth at a carnival after sunset, bumble-flitting from booth to booth, from light to seedy neon light, it may never return to where it began. Now, this flittering has the side benefit that if we can channel ourselves properly while reading, we’ll be able to use other applications as adjuncts to look up words or to go online and find out the hidden meanings or subtexts. But ideally all this functionality would be seamlessly present in the reading experience itself, so we wouldn’t run the risk of losing our place in the reading or our train of thought.

So we either need better applications that keep us rooted to what we’re reading, or we need to police ourselves—perhaps with lockouts that we apply to ourselves that prohibit us from wandering out of the book to check our email or surf the web or only allow us to do this once an hour while reading. Perhaps future software updates for the iPad will allow teachers to lock devices down into ebook-only mode or give students intermittent access to the non-ebook parts of the device. Lockdown controls like this would probably be useful for a lot of adults I know too.

Lockdown controls aren’t the only thing we could benefit from. I think we can all benefit from a brush-up course on digital hygiene, on learning how to focus. And I think we’re going to learn just how important social networks are. A 2012 study by the Association of Magazine Media showed that Gen Y was reading more magazines than ever, although this reading was tied to an increase in the use of social networking sites. So let’s face it, ebooks are going social, and it’s going to be a strange symbiosis, like that between a hummingbird and an orchid: one without the other would likely not last. Digital books will form an unlikely alliance with social networks, and they’ll both survive the changing tides of fashion and the flighty whims of technology.

Still, one of the reasons I adore dedicated e-readers like the Kindle and the Nook, as opposed to tablets like the iPad, is that they keep your attention on an ebook as you read. Like with a print book, you’ve got a dedicated reading experience with no distractions—no buzzing lights or videos or ads for meeting singles online or tweets to respond to. I worry when reading experiences start to include too much distraction and context shifting. As someone sensitive to media ecology, that’s where I draw the line. I think all of us, our children included, should be encouraged toward dedicated experiences, not distracting ones.

Our devices are shortening our children’s attention spans. Our children need to concentrate when they learn to read to become good readers—and from that, good thinkers. But our hypermediated environment is one of constant distraction, so our kids are often learning to read—and through that, to think—in a rather shallow and careless way. It never used to be possible, let alone culturally acceptable, to read and watch TV at the same time. You would have to pick one or the other to focus on.

But now with devices like the iPad, you can multitask between them, switching from reading to watching a video when the book becomes too hard. And let’s face it: our brains are lazy. Ask any cognitive neuroscientist, and they’ll tell you that our brains are machines for avoiding work, if there’s any work to be done. And reading is hard work. It’s rewarding, true, but you have to actively work at it. When you skim a book and passively read it, you don’t recall as much of what you’ve read as when you pause, linger over sentences, find the humor or irony in them, and actively work at the reading experience.

That said, not everyone can focus. Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) causes inattention, distractibility, and disorganization. Incidences of this disorder are on the rise. In fact, it’s estimated that up to 10 percent of American children have this. At the time of this book’s writing, doctors still don’t know what causes ADHD. But most doctors would agree that you don’t try to fight inattention with more inattention. If anything, children with ADHD are encouraged to create routines and avoid distractions. Snacking on digital media on iPads and similar multifunction tablets only feeds the inattention.

Not just children have ADHD. Many adults do too, and the numbers are still climbing. Maybe it’s part and parcel of carrying around so many smartphones and tablets and laptops, of being too plugged in to the internet and chat windows and glittering digital eye-candy. But this disorder is debilitating. In the end state, if this continues unchecked, we run the risk of becoming a nation of ADHDers, unable to focus, engage, or reason clearly.

What’s the way out of this?

Simplicity, mindfulness, and attention. It might be as simple as doing nothing. As long as it’s the right kind of nothing.

In the book Hamlet’s BlackBerry, author William Powers describes a technique that works for him. He calls it a “Walden Zone.” It’s a room without electronics. A room in your house where you can think, like Thoreau on Walden Pond. A place where you can meditate and contemplate—and ideally, you’re not contemplating what your next game of Angry Birds will be like or how you’ll beat your former score.

It’s a technique I use in my own life. There’s always a room in my house with no gadgetry, and I try every year to take a vacation for a few weeks somewhere without electricity. I try to reconnect with myself. Even if you don’t suffer from ADHD, this might work for you too.

If you have other techniques to stay focused that work, why not share them with others who are passionate about ebooks but wary of the perils of having too many distractions? And if you’re a parent or a teacher, what do you think about how reading is taught these days? Do you think kids can become good readers when music and TV and the web and texting are taking up their attention and taking them out of their books?