I think it has been years since I’ve picked up and read a physical book—for better or worse, my reading habit has gone completely digital, and I prefer my Kindle and its backlight over the printed word, or the iPad and Instapaper/Safari[1]. Beyond acknowledging the reality that there’s really just too much to read in the world, I didn’t think much of the transition to digital content.
It turns out that there may be a difference. The gist is that analog books allow for “deep reading”, a type of focus in reading that usually gets lost in the digital realm due to the added distractions that laptops and tablets and phones provide. There is also something about a physical object—with words printed on distinct pages that have a location in space—that solidifies memories that digital books simply cannot provide.
Even the single-purpose e-reader seems to lose out to real books when it comes to letting its readers retain what they’ve read, and when students want to remember a book’s contents, they largely go for hardbacks over LCD screens.
Distractions aside, I still think that the biggest difference between physical and digital books is actually accessibility, in that digital writing is so much easier to find and peruse[2]. We have not figured out how to properly manage and prioritize large quantities of reading material, and so online reading becomes disorienting and distracting, a literary buffet that suffers from the paradox of choice and an evolving model of curation.
Since I won’t be going back to these books of antiquity anytime soon, I guess I’ll have to continue to figure out better ways to skim and skip through the (continuous, unrelenting) digital flood.