I’ve been trying to analyze the growth of e-book consumption, and how it’s related to the way that the Internet has changed our lives. I find the perspectives cited below to be realistic in my experience, but I understand others may not. I’d like to open the question to debate among MGC readers and contributors about what the Internet – and, by extension, e-books – have done and are doing to our minds, and what this signifies for the future of reading.
My interest in the subject was piqued by an article about so-called ‘electronic flight bags’. Flight Global analyzed the current state of the art in that field, and highlighted a number of issues with this new technology that affected how pilots did their job. For example, one pilot is quoted as saying:
“When airlines try and save a few bucks in the paperless environment then they can actually increase the human factor problems for the pilot, as they don’t see the connection between the display of information versus the use of information.”
It seems to me that this comment applies equally well to the way we purchase and read e-books. Indeed, a better verb might be that we ‘consume’ e-books instead of ‘reading’ them. As far back as 2008, Nicholas Carr described how intensive exposure to the Internet was reshaping the way he thought, worked – and read.
“… media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
…
… the Net … may replace the printing press, [but] it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading … is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content’, we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.”
The entire article is well worth reading. In a later article, promoting a book he’s written on the subject (‘The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains’), he expanded on that theme.
“It would be one thing if the ill effects went away as soon as we turned off our computers and mobiles. But they don’t. The cellular structure of the human brain, scientists have discovered, adapts readily to the tools we use to find, store and share information. By changing our habits of mind, each new technology strengthens certain neural pathways and weakens others. The alterations shape the way we think even when we’re not using the technology.
…
The constant distractedness that the net encourages … is very different from the kind of temporary, purposeful diversion of our mind that refreshes our thinking. The cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.
What we seem to be sacrificing in our surfing and searching is our capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection.
…
The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. What’s disturbing is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself — our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the net’s treasures, we have been blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture.”
There’s a fair amount of evidence to support Mr. Carr’s thesis. For example, it’s been claimed that over the course of the last ten years the average attention span has dropped from 12 minutes to 5 minutes. Furthermore, last year doctors in South Korea reported a surge in “digital dementia” among young people who have become so reliant on electronic devices that they can no longer remember everyday details like their phone numbers.
How does this relate to us as authors and consumers of e-books? I think it has more than a little to do with how we approach our world. Consider that on Amazon, you can now read up to 10% of a book without paying a cent using the site’s free sample facility. If you like what you’ve read, you can buy the book with a single click of your mouse – or if you don’t like it, you can discard what you’ve read ( probably not remembering it for longer than a day or two) and go on to something else. That wasn’t possible in pre-e-book days. Whilst I personally regard it as a boon, others might consider it a reflection of our ‘instant gratification’ society and tendency to skim the surface of things rather than delve into them. The question is, is that tendency strengthened and encouraged by the Internet; or is the latter the fruit, the result, of the ‘instant gratification’ impulse?
Then there’s the factor of how many e-books may be downloaded, but never actually read. When I bought dead tree editions, I’d add them to a shelf of books waiting to be read. I could see them whenever I walked past the bookcase. If I wanted reading matter, I knew just where to go to find something – and that also helped me avoid buying too many new books, because I could always remind myself of how many were already waiting on that shelf. With e-books, it’s a different story (you should pardon the expression). I’ve read reports (but so far haven’t found hard facts to substantiate them) that as many as half of all e-books that are downloaded are never read. Once they’re on our e-readers or computers, it’s as if they were ‘out of sight, out of mind’. We buy new e-books rather than bother to read those already waiting for us. (Can anyone cite [and, if possible, link to] sources that can either confirm or refute that? I’d be grateful.)
I’ve also noticed the effect of the Internet on my writing. When I’m writing five to eight thousand words in a single eight- to ten-hour stretch, I seldom bother checking my e-mail or surfing the Web. However, when I’m not ‘on a roll’, creatively speaking, I find myself doing other things much more frequently – to the detriment of my writing output. It’s almost as if my mind will sometimes become more easily and more fully engaged in my writing than it will at other times. Is this the result of what Nicholas Carr identified as ‘Internet exposure’, or is that merely the way it manifests itself in our modern society? Has the Internet taken on the role of a ‘Person from Porlock’ for modern authors?
Mohsin Hamid wrote in the New York Times:
The advantages of e-books are clear … And yet the experience of reading e-books is not always satisfactory … E-reading opens the door to distraction. It invites connectivity and clicking and purchasing. The closed network of a printed book, on the other hand, seems to offer greater serenity. It harks back to a pre-jacked-in age.
What say you, readers? I’ll be interested to read your reactions in Comments.
Mad Genius Club 
35 responses to “E-books, attention spans, and the future of reading”
The shorter attention span argument is similar to an argument made a few years ago on the detrimental effects of television. I don’t put much stock in it. Humans make tools and adapt to tool use. That is simply the way of it. I do not find that my reading or thinking patterns have changed all that much since the advent of the internet or ebooks. I do find that the relative accessibility of ebooks has added depth and richness to my reading. No longer hostage to the whims of managers who produce stocklists of what they think I should read, I am able to pursue topics at my leisure.
As a disabled man, the eBook has been a godsend. I’m not able to travel often to the nearest bookstore some 100+ miles away. The lightness of the e-reader makes reading much more pleasant as the weight of a book can aggravate the arthritis.
I posit that the sufferers of the symptoms in the article are susceptible to distraction in any form, whether from the internet or merely an open window on a sunny day.
Yes, and I’d like to know how they measured attention span in those studies. If one were to monitor my web use during the day, they may very well conclude that my attention span is as little as 2 minutes. however, that’s largely because I have so many more things I can scan over to find things I want to spend time on, that the scanning would count grievously against the focusing.
And I think that has more to do with it than they realize: It’s not so much that we get in a habit of scanning and dumping, but that there is so much MORE available, that we scan over things and don’t delve into them unless they really catch our attention, whereas before, we normally had to study what we had available, because getting more would be a chore and possibly a significant expense.
As to not reading the ebooks that we buy, I DO think that the interfaces of ebook readers could use a serious upgrade in the management functionality, so we could see things like last time opened, position of last closure, number of times completed, etc.
I have repeatedly downsized over the past several years. The cost has been the loss of physical books. I have had an ereader since the early days of nook and kindle. It has allowed me to retain books that would otherwise be out of my life forever. I like the ease and comfort of my ereader and do not really feel the loss of books.
More to the point, I am one of those who downloads more than she reads. Since I started writing I read less than I did before. More of my time is spent writing, which I find much more interesting than reading. To the extent my attention span has shrunk, it is because of the ease I find in shutting up any unnecessary talking heads.
TL,DR.
The simple fact that we now have an acronym for “too long, didn’t read” probably says it all. People don’t even have the attention span to read longer online posts nor can they be bothered to even type out a four-word comment explaining why they didn’t read the post. I know parents whose children read a lot. Much of the time, I discover those parents have heavy restrictions on television watching and computer usage. Looking back over my son’s eighteen years on this planet, I find myself wishing I’d done the same thing.
Words are cheap and easy; writers loose- or never cultivated- their skill at polishing and condensing.
After the first fifteen or twenty times you wade through something three times the size of a newspaper’s front page story, only to go: “…that was a waste of time,” you develop a response.
TL,DR is popular partly because it is funny to respond to someone whose fingers got way, way too much use with five characters.
As an IT professional in a public school system, I am about to bite the hand that feeds me. I have noted a huge decrease in my own attention span over the last 10 to 12 years, and stories I’m hearing from teachers regarding middle- and high-school age students are beginning to frighten me. The children coming from the grade schools seem barely capable of concentrating on anything other than their networked gadgets for more than a few minutes. For myself, I’ve declared a set number of days of the week “offline.” No internet, cell phone, no TV. If I must use the laptop to write something, the wireless router and DSL are switched off. I haven’t included my kindle in this yet, but I have enough physical books to read that it hasn’t become an issue. I’m beginning to think that keeping kids off of the internet — or at least some aspects of it, such as social media — until their personalities have a chance to form would be a good idea, but I’ve no idea how to even attempt such a thing.
As far as digital dementia – I’ll bet if the researchers had asked about the finer points of the magic systems in Warcraft, or the cheat codes in the most popular video games, or to list the types of pokemon and their various powers and ranks (It’s actually a giant database; i have a friend who wrote it all up in excel, and went on to become an accountant), then the kids would display excellent memory skills.
Human have systems, tools, and categories for what they need to remember or don’t, and if they can get a tool to do the remembering, they promptly rely on the tool instead of using their brain. How fast did people abandon slide rules when calculators became available? How few people practice astrogation once the INS systems came out on airplanes – long before the invention of GPS? Who keeps rolodexes of phone numbers and flips through them, trying to find a phone number, when you can punch it into a cell phone once and tap the name after that?
I will grant that we have shorter attention spans and forget a lot of data – in the age of photography, a painter does not need to be able to memorize every single person present and what they’re wearing at the coronation of the king before painting the scene for everyone who couldn’t make it to see. In the age of the written word, we do not chant long winding sagas over the feast in order to remember who our ancestors are, what clans we are tied to by blood and by oath, and what our codes and morals, laws and punishments are. Instead of a dearth of data, we have adapted the ability to process a flood of it.
Instead of skimming the newspaper for the tone and a bit of content, and only reading the full thing on Sundays, we now skim a news site or two, usually an aggregator. Instead of relying on sorting through the gossip to know how everyone in our village is doing, we sort through memes and cat photos to keep up with bloggers or MyTwitFace acquaintances and friends (and family.)
As for not remembering samples – trust me, I don’t remember any of the books I picked up in a bookstore, read the back cover and perhaps two pages, then put back, either, long before there were ebooks. If it’s a good book, it’ll keep me entertained for hours. If it’s not, I have a world of other distractions and entertainment offered, and not much reason to keep reading.
I keep hoping that some genius somewhere will invent a quantum improvement in presentation. I suspect a good deal of the degradation of knowledge that springs from the change in media is engendered by the p**s-poor presentation. And that, in my personal prejudice, is due almost entirely to the fact that Web standards have been developed by engineers, rather than by designers. The habits, patterns, and practices of print design have evolved over centuries — more than a millennium, if you include the precursors to the printed page. The colossal arrogance of throwing all that away for the high-tech paradigm of information presentation is — in my not-so-very-humble opinion — coming around to bite us in the ass.
I am, personally, at any given moment struggling to climb the very steep learning curves of several applications — presently mostly 3D apps and suites. My problem is not in failing to comprehend the fundamentals of 3D space or the manipulation of objects within a program. It comes, rather, with apprehending the interfaces — the choices the engineers programming the app have taken in providing a suite of tools for the purposes. These processes are exposited in massive manuals — thousands of pages in readily-available .pdf files. But the nature of the Acrobat “ebook” makes it difficult if not impossible to absorb the knowledge in a manner conducive to retention. I put this down to the fallacious assumption that the screen can be made equivalent to the page and that reading-for-learning (unlike reading-for-amusement) remains unchanged in any circumstance.
I am in early days in this finding and cannot divine the consequences of this, and would welcome others’ speculation on the matter. But I fear that, at the current state of the art, the prediction of a paperless world is at best a pipe dream.
M
This makes sense. But useful standards been forgotten before. Illuminated books were written and designed to make it easier to remember and mentally organize the information in a book (and a lot of those margin illos are visual versions of horrible mnemonic puns). Written books continued that tradition as long as the memory skills were still being taught; then people forgot, and all the obvious intuitive interface became a curiosity.
OTOH, I think a lot of useful book and print design is desired by writers and publishers and users, but it’s hard to know how to put it into play if the system doesn’t help beginners. I wanted to turn Bible quotes into rubrics in my ebook, but you have to make them bluerics on Kindle. OTOH, I love knowing I’ve got fleurons!!!
Hmm… I wonder if getting game designers involved with creating interfaces would help.
Based on that, I wonder what would happen if someone contracted a game interface designer to write a front-end interface for an application, and a developer to create a wrapper that used that front-end, and drove the application based on the interface; whether that would instigate an improvement in the standards.
The windows style guide put an end to most GUI and interface design experimentation. And that allowed for widespread adoption of computer programs to do things. I remember the early days, (which still exist to a certain extent in open source). You didn’t know where the programmer put the print command, how to close the program, or how tools would be organized. Standardizing that helped spread adoption, but stiffled innovation. When the web was young, the same sort of thing happened. Remember when people would code beautiful sites that were a complete mystery of navigation? Without putting in the effort of figuring it out, I didn’t get past the opening page…
What happened in gui’s is similar to our keyboard layout. It was one of many options, not even the ‘best’ (as it was designed to deliberately slow down typing) but now we are stuck with it because it is familiar to all. Think about the outrage when the Office Ribbon interface made its appearance. Of try to use a mac if you are a long time windows user.
As far as game designers are concerned, I think we are WAY overdue for a 3d “rooms and hallways” metaphor in the OS. That sort of thing would be right up game designers’ alley.
zuk
Sadly, yes, it is designed by engineers. On the other hand, very few “designers” have the technical or programming chops to have created these in the first place.
There are several issues with web/computer presentation that simply don’t exist in the print world, and a LOT of work has been done via the CSS specs (you should REALLY take a look at some of the stuff on “A list apart”) in providing a means to consistently and beautifully style and present information, while preventing having to custom-code every bit of information presented.
The biggest one is that there is no way to guarantee what size device the information is displayed on. Or even what proportion. Imagine having to design a print layout to be printed on arbitrary size and proportion sheets….
BTDT, was invited to contribute to A List Apart when it was new, but couldn’t afford to donate my time. Now, they probably wouldn’t have me — having moved past that stage. (The “Hey, Kids! My uncle has a barn! Let’s put on a show!” stage the Web was in back in the late ’90s.) I find some of the objections to good document design on the part of programmers to be a tad specious, especially considering that flexible web page design has come about. And look how easy THAT was!
However, Adobe (whom we DTP pros have long castigated for not even following their OWN standards) has made a dog’s breakfast of the portable document format (you could hear chapter and verse on this from PDF and PostScript programmers such as Aandi Inston and Rus Miller), which is, in a particularly vicious follow-on, is causing no end of problems for creators of eBooks and POD books.
M
I failed to make the point in my first comment that I would willingly pay the price for a printed and perfect-bound paperback of the manual for any program, provided it were well-written and up to at least the date of the alpha version of the program. Software publishers whine about the cost of printing manuals that “nobody reads anyway” (how do they know?), but never mention the opportunity costs in poorly-documented software. But this is about printed books’ being superior to eBooks for learning purposes. Whatever.
M
They know that “nobody reads [them] anyway” because of the call rates that are actually answered by their first tier tech support (i.e. the guy from India who’s never even seen the program he’s supporting but can read a script).
When I moved from Philadelphia to Los Angeles back in 2001, none of the print books I’d been gathering and hoarding my entire life — and I had been gathering and hoarding a lot — made the journey. It would have been too expensive to ship or haul them out with me. It was heartbreaking, but every time I pick up my Kindle or download an e-book, I know that I’ll never have to face a situation like it again. That alone was enough for me to switch and focus on reading e-books rather than print today.
I used to lament my piles of TBR books, and I have a substantial equivalent set in ebook form now. But I feel much less guilty about it than I used to.
I’d love to have the money back for 90% of it, but that’s a sunk cost. Now-a-days, I focus on time spent. I may read hundreds of books/year, but nothing can force me to spend one hour I will never get back on finishing my TBR piles, just out of a sense of obligation. I’ll never run out of books, but I’ll run out of time all too soon. If only I could control my distractions so I can write more… 🙂
It is said that Einstein kept a phone book handy to look up numbers. “Why use valuable memory when the book is at hand” or something. I had a friend that would hit ‘O’ and get the operator to dial the number for him. Read a book, probably never did even once in his life. He wasn’t a reader. I think that computers, cell phones and other electronic equipment can be misused like anything else. Reading is in competition with all the other things in the world to do. Like bhalsop, my reading has dropped since I started writing, then with two point five acres and other facts of life, I don’t have time to do more. Then, what is offered to read in the mainstream too. The average young person is loaded with stuff today, if nothing more than a constant phone call. Gone are the days of slipping off to the woods with a fishing pole and a good book. But, one thing I have noticed is that books are getting too long, even with consistent action, we need to drop back at least to under a hundred K. One gets burned out by many goat gaggers after a while.
My mother grew up in Antwerp and got out of there via an American GI. Her entire life was marked by the war-time scarcity — she was never going to be short of nice dresses and nylons, ever again.
I grew up in the mid-West just as SFF paperbacks (e.g., Ace doubles) were becoming available in bookstores. As a young teen, I effectively “bought out” the bookstore sections on SFF, back when that was still possible to do. For a decade or so, I operated in a book-scarcity world, and I’ve never been able to shake the impact of that. I have little impulse control when presented with new books, and I may never be able to change. The trick now is to let that only impact my wallet, not my remaining working hours.
Translated from the personal diary of Nebruachzar, 3rd level scribe, Royal Library of Babylon: “We live in degenerate times. The youth of today barely know how to use a proper stylus, preferring this new fad of papyrus that is so flimsy and prone to combustion, unlike good honest mud. They complain it takes too long to bake a message, and the mud stains their garments–which, by the way, they refuse to girdle tightly so that the edges drag on the ground. Further, they disrespect their elders to a shocking degree. No good can come of this. I await the end of civilization and the god’s cleansing fire.”
Sulla thought Gaius Julius Caesar III dressed like a punk.
I’m plussing this post. 🙂
I find myself distracted by the internet and limit it to early morning/late evening. I moved my desk into a corner to avoid looking out the window instead of writing. I don’t down-load that many books to my tablet, but I read them all. I also check out a dozen books every two weeks from the library from Steven King’s “if you’re not a reader, you’re not a writer.” Unfortunately, my grandkids have the attention span of a gnat and don’t read for pleasure :-((
That’s one thing I don’t like about Kindle – you can’t go direct to your TBR books.
You can create “Collections” and file them that way.
History is ever a guide to these things…
I’ve no doubt that the old skalds and bards like Homer bemoaned the change from purely oral records to written ones, and likely pitched a fit at their impending unemployment: “Why, these young people have no respect for our hard-won skills… They’re simply having these nasty scribes “write” down our tales and ancient lore, so that they needn’t bother to memorize any of it… We’re doomed, I tell you, doomed…”.
The more things change, the less they actually change. It’s all surfaces and presentations; the forms we knew and grew up on are changing. The “novel” of the 22nd Century is likely to be something we would more likely recognize as a fully-immersive game, a created world with which the “reader/player” can interact. And, it may well be something that’s fed in from neural feedways, as opposed to read or heard. That will be something totally different from what we know, and yet… Still very much the same: Humans telling other humans tales from their imagination, much as Homer would likely recognize Jane Austen, who would recognize Robert Heinlein. And, Heinlein would likely recognize the folks behind Halo and other such games as fellows, as well.
The externalities don’t matter; the tale, however is paramount. How it is told is immaterial.
Libraries were the place where I could pick up a book, flip through it, and make a decision on whether I wanted to check it out or not. For about two minutes, mall bookstores served that purpose, and then used bookstores became my drug of choice, and that’s where I first indulged in buying what I might not read. Have owned Doestoevsky’s The Idiot for YEARS and never got past the first few chapters. But it’s there when I feel need. Friends hated to help me move, because books are so heavy.
Can’t really get to the library as well nowadays because I’m a gimp and need a gimpstick to get around and it still hurts. BUT: jselvy, the first poster, nailed it for those of us who are disabled. LOTS of great stuff available free, lots available cheap, and lots of devices we can use to read it. It’s a ot better than handicapped parking and big toilet stalls.
I’ve never been able to read (easily) in libraries, certainly not non-fiction, though fiction presents some of the same problems.
It’s all the books! The answers to every transient question are right there! So start with this, go grab that, which leads to this other one…
The internet, connectivity in general, provides the same possibilities exponentially.
When I really needed to focus on the task at hand, initially I’d leave the library. In time, though, I developed the discipline to push the distractions aside and focus. It’s the same discipline in the internet age.
Others have touched on different aspects, but I don’t think we’re living in a time of fundamental transformation of the human animal. I do think we’re seeing the indications of a shift in tools, with the same human behaviors adapting to new methods and thus looking very strange. But — just like sitting in the library, there’s a wealth of information sitting in front of me and I can satisfy the curiosities of a generalist with skims and overviews. On those subjects I wish to gain more proficiency, I knuckle down and focus.
How this impacts writers, storytellers — I’m not sure it does. Engaging story still draws, and reading is a different experience from game story, television or movies. Storytellers have always been in competition with other alternative pastimes. Such fabulous changes have been wrought in how we can communicate story and how we can reach people, yet — words are still strung together to bring readers into the writer’s world.
The old “Flight Bag” sucked compared to an Electronic Flight Bag. Every two weeks you would get a big fat envelope from Jeppesen with the latest change pages and a three or four page set of instructions how to go through your 20+ pounds of notebooks and swap the new pages for the old pages. ( Did I mention the bag was heavy? ) Every two weeks at least two hours of your lifespan spent mindlessly doing a page change. ( Heavy too. )
Now, on the iPad’s Jeppesen app, a cute little icon pops up and says to update it. Touchy touch and you are done.
As far as using it inflight….you have to get a little ahead of the thing with planning. Any sudden changes require some thought to how to use the app. I can live with that. New tech requires new habits. No biggie.
…and I would never ever think of using an ebook reader to read a novel or other non-professional literature on the flight deck during those 8 hours of boring times drilling a hole through the skies over the Pacific. Nope. I’m totally focused on the airplane and gauges that don’t change for hours at a time. Not even a Sarah Hoyt novel.
No distractions here.
Hell, the fuel savings from dropping 50 lbs of paper out of the cockpit more than pays for the iPads.
Yup. Not to mention the visits to the chiro by 60 year old out of shape fat guys.
Moving from country to country, continent to continent, for us, the constant was our library. If we had to leave one behind in storage, we would inevitably rebuild one. My family raided the secondhand book fair at the US base in East Berlin (and that was where I got the beginnings of my own fiction library; Dragonworld, Anne McCaffrey’s works, Tolkien, Star Trek – anything that looked vaguely interesting) and we came out with our poor car groaning under the weight of books. This trend of going out, specifically to buy books, and haul them home en masse, was a once-a month thing with us, especially once we got to Paris, where there were plenty of bookstores that ALSO had English-language books to be obtained. The books would be shipped to the Philippines in large boxes on the move back, along with another household’s worth of equipment. Those books were what helped my friends and I do research papers and homework, since the library we had rivalled those our schools had. My dad had by then ingrained into me that there were certain books that one must have in a library: dictionaries, encyclopedias, books on science and history, classical literature (or, at the very least, Mark Twain and Shakespeare). I don’t remember learning English, or ‘how to write’ – but retained how things were written from the things I read.
When I visited Rhys for the first time in Australia, (his graduation gift to me) one of the things he made sure I had in the guest room was a shelf he built himself, and yes, we made sure we bought books (At the time, I got introduced to Matthew Reilly and Dan Brown – Dan Brown I eventually stopped reading; Reilly however, I await the release of his next book this November!) I had brought with me as well, the omnibus of Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels trilogy a friend had lent me, and when rendered helpless with laughter, Rhys had to find out why, so that started our trend of reading out loud to each other.
Rhys visited my family’s home for the first time, he loved my room – the shelves filled to overflowing with books. He would help me sort and dust the books, and eventually he built for me a wall-attached floor to ceiling bookshelf along one wall, which was soon filled to overflowing. When finally we were planning to move our family to Australia, the thought of leaving my library behind was unthinkable – to him, because he decided that it would be more expensive to rebuild my library than it would be to ship it to Australia. (Having seen the prices of books here, I have to agree.) So, along with household goods (my siblings and I divided up our inheritance of what my mother called ‘the foundations of our own houses – kitchen ware, cookbooks, and such) we shipped no less than 28 alis-bayan boxes full of books; the other twenty-two were large pots and pans and other fragile items wrapped in bubble wrap like silkworm cocoons. (‘Leaving country’; as opposed to the more ubiquitous balik-bayan ‘returning to country’ boxes sent back to relatives by family residing outside of the Philippines). Only some of the books are shelved right now; not all of them. We’re still adding to the books here, but not as quickly as we used to (book prices… sigh!)
I haven’t transitioned to an ebook reader for ‘convenience’ – so ebooks I buy are sitting in my online Kindle cloud for now, though I will occasionally read through a few using the computer ebook apps. I’m slowly building a digital library of reference information from what I can get free for my books that I’m planning and writing and worldbuilding. I’ve noticed no loss of capacity for concentration regardless of what I read; online, webpage, or book of either type- for me the time still flies all too quickly. I only delight in the greater amount of information that I can access. I do find it easier to go to a shelf and flip through a book for information I want to find, than it is for me to have to try dig through an ebook that might have the information I want – first finding the ebook, then paging through it one page at a time. The latter is more time consuming than going brrrr with the pages of a book, skim skim, “aha!”
That’s why ebooks won’t stop me from getting physical books – the ones we have have been helpful for the children’s school work as well as my own ^.^ I guess in writing this reply you trade in the physical size of a book library for time spent in ebooks searching… But I’m a very old fashioned sort of girl, and apologize for the rambling reply.
A few things. I was one of those who noticed that my attention span was declining… I now have a difficult time sitting through a movie… hour-long (well, 42 minutes, anyway) TV episodes are my forte.
And then along came writing and my TV time went to zero as I tried to work a job and write. Eventually I quit my day job, well before I sold anything, My reading time only changed a little, then I retired and started writing a lot. My reading went down to next to zero and it was all research — and writing.
Many years ago I went as a teenager to Europe and I left my father with instructions to send my a particular box of books when I got settled. I got a box of books when I had settled, but it wasn’t the one I expected. I gave him a piece of my mind, and he promised he would send the right box. For three weeks I would get a notice from the Bundes Post that there was a package too large to be delivered, would I come and fetch it? I had to buy a granny grocery cart because otherwise they were too heavy to carry. I never did get the right box, but I did get the rest of my library. Had to ship them back on a ship. Berlin was a fantastic place to shop for books — the British NAAFI club had every Penguin book published, the Americans had a really great newsstand at Andrews Barracks — and I got several (what I consider priceless) books from US Army salvage sales.
I’m not convinced that whatever is happening is a bad thing. And I do have plenty of attention span to read a novel. In fact, let’s consider the Epic Fantasy (said in a booming, echo-y voice). Novels are getting longer. Movies are getting longer. (The Hobbit in 3 parts? Really?) Long-form narrative *anything* is getting longer. OTOH, I too find myself impatient when it takes too long to get around to the important information in non-fiction. I want to be able to skim and pick out the important bits of information, facts, and relationships… if I have to hunt for the important bits in between the filler I get downright annoyed.
It’s true, I think, that people used to have a lot of patience for a story that meandered around aimlessly or a treatise that was mostly gas or long transitions within story telling. But people also used to portray novel reading as a vice and waste of time, slothfulness, and tried to discourage it and few people read the philosophers or natural history tomes. Have the percentage of people with the patience and will to read long *boring* things really decreased that much?
Oh and… the Bible has long (looooooonnngggg) been divided into extremely short little bits to be taken up in bite sized chunks. So… there is that.
I read fast, and I read a lot. I am in the process of divesting myself of my actual books, excepting a very few volumes which have some special meaning. I read the words, which is all that is important to me. And if the words are on a Kindle, or on my phone, or scrolling by my retina on an implant, the fewer things that come between me and the words, the better. I don’t need to hold a book in my hands to read a story. I have all my manuals on the Kindle in PDF format. And I am a certifiable geezer, no question. the only thing not on my kindle is the color cover, and frankly, most of them are awful.