Reader, I Googled It

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From The New Yorker:

A physical book is good for much more than reading. In our house, we have several large art books propping up a movie projector. A thin paperback is wedged under a couch leg in a spot where our old floors are especially uneven. One summer we pressed wildflowers between the pages of a gigantic book about the Louvre, and later used it to flatten out a freshly purchased Radiohead poster. I am not the first person to choose a large, sturdy book as an impromptu cutting board: the cover of the Exeter Book, a tenth-century repository of Anglo-Saxon literature, bears knife marks from what looks like chopping. Stains on its ancient vellum suggest that, like the big atlas of Vermont in our living room, it was also possibly used as a drink coaster. Twenty years ago, I had a very large bump on my wrist. The doctor examined it and told me it was a harmless fluid deposit—nothing to worry about. His remedy, delivered cheerfully in a French accent, has stuck with me: “Slam it with a book.”

As Leah Price suggests in her brisk new study, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading” (Basic), physical books—which, ten or so years ago, many fretted might soon be obsolete—show no signs of going away. Nobody would try to pop a cyst with a Kindle or prop open a window with a phone.

I am writing this on a laptop in a room designed almost entirely for reading physical books—a room that now bears “the ghostly imprint of outdated objects,” as Price puts it. Prolonged arrangement of the body in relation to a book seems to require a whole range of supporting matter—shelves, lamps, tables, “reading chairs”—not strictly necessary for the kinds of work a person does on a screen. Take away the book and the reader, and the whole design of the room starts to feel a little sad, the way a nursery feels once the baby grows up. Insert, where the reader was, a person on his device, and function becomes décor—which, Price suggests, is what books now are for many of us. As their “contents drift online,” books and reading environments have been imbued “with a new glamor,” turned into symbols of rich sentience in a world of anxious fidgeting. When Wallace Stevens, the supreme poet of winter dusk, celebrated the “first light of evening,” it was likely a reading lamp. The glow of a screen as darkness encroaches seems, by comparison, eerie and malevolent.

But it was never the books as objects that people worried would vanish with the advent of e-readers and other personal devices: it was reading itself. The same change was prophesied by Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the movie age. People fretted again with the advent of the radio, the TV, and home computers. Yet undistracted reading didn’t perish the moment any of these technologies were switched on. This is in part because, as Price argues, it never exactly existed to begin with. Far from embodying an arc of unbroken concentration, books have always mapped their readers’ agitation—not unlike the way a person’s browsing history might reveal a single day’s struggle, for example, to focus on writing a book review.

. . . .

Price, who has taught English at Cambridge, Harvard, and Rutgers universities, is the founding director of the Rutgers Book Initiative, a wide-ranging venture that promotes book history at universities and libraries. She is not an elegist for print: her extraordinary grasp of every development in book history, from incunabula to beach reads, monasteries to bookmobiles, suggests that a love of printed matter need not be a form of nostalgia. She warns of the danger of turning books into a “bunker,” a place to wait out the onslaught of digital life. Print, she reminds us, was itself once a destabilizing technology.

In Price’s radical view, a book might act something like a switchboard, connecting readers who connect to it. Though Price’s title riffs on the famous Raymond Carver short-story collection, substituting “books” for “love,” the most important word is, in fact, “talk.” Her book, and my review, and the attention you bring to both, are examples of the very kind of “talk” across every conceivable platform that Price finds so plentiful and so encouraging in the digital age. What we now possess, in her mostly cheery view, are “places and times” in which readers can “have words with one another.” These infrastructures, as Price calls them, do more to “shape reading” than “whether we read in print or online or in some as-yet-unimagined medium.” And these reading infrastructures are more varied and more durable than ever before, even if people are reading on their devices. The important thing is the “interactions through which we get our hands on books,” as well as those that “awaken a desire for them.”

. . . .

Books themselves were viewed by some Victorians as dangerous vehicles of contagion. Certain libraries still have the weird antiseptic feeling of a hospital ward. And they tend to reproduce the hierarchies of whatever community they serve.

. . . .

Independent bookstores—which suffered under the proliferation of giant Barnes & Noble and Borders stores in the nineties, then again with the triumph of Amazon—are now on the rise in much of the United States. They survive partly on popular—and lucrative—authors’ readings. These events have the effect of making an object often prized because it is perfectly standardized and reproducible into a unique keepsake. A visiting author signs piles of books that then usually cannot be returned to the publisher. The signature makes the book simultaneously worthless and priceless; most good bookstores have signed copies on their shelves for this reason. Inevitably, these signed copies, possessions that can only exist in the world of objects, appear on social media.

. . . .

When a book sits next to the Internet, its authority as the final word on anything is automatically undermined. With a few keystrokes, I found out that Hemingway’s copy of “Ulysses” may have been used more extensively than Price suggests. (A 2014 scholarly paper by John Beall, available as a PDF, finds that, on the basis of the number of cut pages in his copy, Hemingway “probably read well over two-thirds” of the book.) Price’s drive to make her book as current as possible—she marks the date of its completion as “late in 2018”—suggests that its nature is also to be quickly superseded, like a Farmers’ Almanac.

Her radiant descriptions of the physical properties of books, the forensic traces—from smudges to candle wax—of earlier bodies holding them, immediately sent me to the Internet, where I viewed, up close, papal indulgences printed by Gutenberg and the first vegetarian cookbook in English, “Vegetable Cookery,” from 1833. The Internet excels at images of print, so vivid they feel tangible. Where the print object is too rare or fragile to be seen in person, in such detail, the effect is profound.

Throughout Price’s book, I thought of Emily Dickinson, whose handwritten poems, sometimes inscribed on scavenged paper, have suffered so much by being printed and bound. To understand the power of those poems, you have to see Dickinson’s script (like “fossil bird-tracks” across the white of the page, as the author and minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson put it). Dickinson resisted publication, perhaps because it was synonymous with print, which renders every space and every dash, no matter its handwritten span, as the same conventional length. The online Emily Dickinson archive fixes that problem, and allows you to zoom in so tightly that you can often make out threads of the paper fibre in the office stationery she sometimes used. Even when you see an original Dickinson manuscript under a magnifying glass, you cannot come that close.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

Perhaps PG has spent too many hours over too many years with digital devices and the information they provide to understand the angst over the possibility that physical books may continue to decline in popularity to the point where they become museum objects.

PG is completely satisfied and comfortable with ebooks. While he understands that many readers are not, he confidently predicts most will become econverts in the foreseeable future.

As one illustration of the advantages of ebooks for PG, he reads for pleasure every day. Such pleasure-reading usually takes place in the evening, quite often while he is lying in bed. Whatever he is reading is propped on his chest. For him, the whisp of a Kindle is barely felt. Turning a page involves a thumb tap instead of a two-handed process that briefly interrupts his reading.

As with some readers of any age, but more commonly for those of a certain maturity, PG’s neck can become a bit sore when he lies on his back with his head propped up on a pillow for a long time.

Instead, with his featherweight ereader, PG can lie flat on his back and read in perfect comfort for many hours.

Reading while flat on his back does require one additional inexpensive non-electronic device which increases PG’s dorky appearance index a thousand-fold when he is using it. Mrs. PG has charitably accepted this device, but PG would never expect anyone else to do so.
 

Click here to see what the device looks like, then return.

 

Click here to see what a person using this device looks like, laugh all you like, then return.

 

The device does fit over PG’s prescription computer glasses, so it is impaired-vision-friendly. It is also cheap. As mentioned, PG is able to read quite comfortably with his Kindle resting on his chest instead of being held above it as the photo depicts.

PG is finally free from the worry that an unscrupulous person might creep into his bedroom while he is reading, snap a cellphone photo and blackmail him by threatening to post the image online.

27 thoughts on “Reader, I Googled It”

  1. Those would be great at meetings! 😛

    And I’ve found that after a certain age/point most of us don’t actually give a damn what others think and therefore dress/do as we please.

    “Books themselves were viewed by some Victorians as dangerous vehicles of contagion.”

    The ‘contagion’ they most feared was the commoners learning and possibly thinking for themselves.

    I do like all the OP’s uses for books they don’t bother to read. Before books got so cheap to waste like that, most people would have used scrap pieces of wood; though back then most people had the scrap wood because you made things for yourself and way back when you could grab something off the woodpile you had to feed the stove/oven/fireplace.

    (I’m one to talk though, as I can see from my chair a laser printer that needed to be slightly raised. I wonder if the OP would would get a kick out of instead of using books which I like to reread there are small boxes of practice ammo under each corner? – Why yes, the printer sometimes leans when I’m running low … 😉 )

  2. I’ve already sent one out as a birthday present. The jury is out for awhile.

    As far as resurgent bookstores go, how about this one from Ogden Utah?

    https://www.standard.net/news/business/booked-on-th-closes-leaving-ogden-without-a-physical-bookstore/article_d7cc65da-9485-5b77-b6ea-66f07663bccb.html

    “… an assessment of the family budget signaled that Rizzi could no longer work without drawing a paycheck — something she’d done since Booked first opened its doors.”

    In mid-May of this year, Rizzi sold Booked to Scott Glenn

    Glenn was optimistic when he took over Booked.

    “It felt like we did everything we could think of to generate traffic — lots of marketing, and we introduced a new summer bingo program that’s been successful in our other store,” Glenn said.

    But August’s “brutally poor sales” dealt the business’s final blow.

      • Well, Rizzi ran it for three years without taking a salary, which means we don’t even know if it broke even or not. She sold it to an area bookstore owner, and my guess is he just bought the stock and fixtures, if that. He can sell them at their wholesale value and if he doesn’t have much of a lease or rental agreement, he hasn’t lost much money – at least not compared to keeping the store open in the face of “brutally poor sales”.

  3. First, my books are not cutting boards or shims.

    Second, while we have an extensive personal library, we have owned many, many Kindles over the years.

    Third, I want my next Kindle to be a chip implanted in my skull, just behind my left ear, displaying a virtual screen in front of me, like a data read floating in mid-air within the vision field of a fighter pilot, engaging the enemy at Mach 3.

    Is that too much to ask?

    Dan

    • Third, I want my next Kindle to be a chip implanted in my skull…

      Is that too much to ask?

      Not until the surgeon tells you what it will cost to upgrade the hardware. That will be too much to ask.

    • . . . like a data read floating in mid-air within the vision field of a fighter pilot, engaging the enemy at Mach 3.

      Is that too much to ask?

      Well, yeah.

      That thing you call a ‘data read’, pilots call a heads-up-display (HUD, although I never heard anyone use that acronym). And nobody engages at Mach 3. Why? Because you can’t. Mach 3 is Blackbird territory. You need a space the size of Texas to turn around. Most ACM (air combat maneuvering) takes place in the transonic region; say, Mach 0.8 to Mach 0.95. But you really don’t want to ‘engage the enemy’. That can get you dead. No. You want to kill the other guy before he knows you’re there. (AFAIK the US air forces (Air Force, Navy, Marines) are the only ones who fly women in fighters, so don’t start with me on my choice of pronouns, okay?)

      But if what you want is a book projected onto the backside of your eyelids when you close your eyes, yeah, I guess, someday you may get that. My guess is that it is as imminent as commercial nuclear fusion, which has been only 20 years away for 50 years now.

      • So we’re really getting fusion next year? 😉

        https://www.inverse.com/article/31034-augmented-reality-contact-lenses

        Contact lens electronics are a major research area for consumer electronics companies and contact lens HUDs are a key target of Augmented Reality, which is under development at a dozen computing companies and more. Most notably Microsoft, who have had a commercial implementation for several years. with the second generation coming in a couple of weeks. So far, they’re still at the visor level, but with typical computer business gains making each generation smaller and lighter and contact lens display tech evolving separately, a personal HUD will be with us some time next decade.

        So yes, contact lens “monitors” for video, gaming, and reading are coming and sooner than most imagine.

        For HUDs all you need is one but with two, 3D augmented reality ala hololens becomes ubiquitous.

        Life becomes a first-person video game.

        • If you can tolerate contact lenses at all. A lot of people can’t. And a lot of those who can, can only use the disposable soft lenses, which I am fairly sure are not what Microsoft has in mind.

          File under ‘The Technology of the Future (And Always Will Be)’, alongside flying cars and bubble memory.

          • Well, the contact lenses are a goal because the alternative–glasses–already exist.

            That display tech is no challenge.

            The challenge with glasses is *what* to display, which is why Google glass failed but the bulkier Hololens succeeded. One was a solution in search of problem while the latter is a practical answer to real world problems; hand-less repair manuals for on-the-spot use, surgeon assistants, etc.

            Last week at IFA 2019 in Europe, TCL showed up their prototype for their HD glasses as a cellphone accessory. Essentially a replacement for portable DVD players. Useful on planes and long train rides (hence the presentation in Europe) or for mobile gaming (enormous in Asia and big elsewhere). An adaptation of existing VR tech but without the inner ear motion sickness issues.

            Lots of potential uses discussed but books weren’t among them. Seems like nobody in tech wants to deal with the tech-adverse establishment. Or go against Amazon. 🙂

            A problem for down the road.

    • I took a curious look at them, Meryl – they’re for anyone, working with bare eyes, reading glasses, or (like me) prescriptions that are on my face at least 18 hours out of 24.

      (I decided against trying them, though. When I read laying down these days, I’m on the Kindle, and laying on my side. What I need is something like a bedside wrist rest…)

      • I generally don’t read in bed unless I’m sick. Even then, unless I’m really bad, I get out of bed and read in my very comfy leather chair that I named The Chair That Swallows You Whole. But I do read at night.

    • Sorry for the delay in responding, Meryl.

      At most times, I use glasses with progressive lenses (no-line bifocals).

      I asked for a prescription for single-vision “computer glasses” when I had my eyes examined a couple of years ago and purchased an inexpensive pair. (God bless Zenni!).

      I found that I preferred my regular glasses for computer work (which may involve checking documents, etc., an activity for which progressive lenses work better.)

      However, when I started using my 90-degree prism glasses, I tried them with both my progressive lenses and my computer glasses and found the computer glasses worked better, in part because when I’m on my back reading, I’m only dealing with text at a single distance and I unconsciously position the Kindle at the proper distance for clear vision.

    • Sorry, I didn’t completely respond to the various questions.

      The 90-degree glasses I use fit over the frames of my computer glasses and are stable when I’m lying on my back.

      There is a bit of a collision between the earpieces of the 90-degree glasses and my computer glasses, but a minor adjustment in the positions of the two make things comfortable. As mentioned, stability is not an issue when I’m on my back.

    • Mrs. PG is a very tolerant woman, Karen.

      OTOH, Mrs. PG admits to her own quirks, perhaps not as obvious as mine, and I am happy to return the tolerance.

  4. PG, you linked to three different products — do you recommend any particular one? (Or, since I visited all three pages, I could just wait for the inevitable e-mail from Amazon suggesting I buy all of them.)

    • According to my Amazon purchase records, I bought these: https://amzn.to/2NOHZVQ.

      From an examination of various vendors of these kinds of glasses, I suspect they are either copying each other or are purchasing their stock from the same manufacturer.

      These have the general shape of goggles, which allows them to easily fit over the frames of my glasses.

      I remember seeing some prism glasses that looked much smaller, more like the tiny little reading glasses that appear to be designed so they rest on your nose and you can look down when you are reading, then look up and over the frames when you want to look at something in the distance. I don’t know that the small kind would fit over standard prescription glasses.

      Here’s a link to an example of the smaller versions – https://amzn.to/2A5UmoJ

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