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posted by n1 on Sunday June 15 2014, @03:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the tl;dr dept.

Tim Gray, writing in the New York Reviews of Books, has a very interesting article that asks whether it has become impossible to find the uninterrupted blocks of time that are needed to read serious works of literature, and whether the change in the reading environment is also changing how books are written.

Ordinarily I ignore the "Computer Bad! Destroy Society!" arguments, but I have to say that what he describes seems all too familiar. I can't recall the last time that I actually sat down for two or three hours just to read.

I grew up spending hours each day, every day devouring books of all sorts. Is this a thing that's lost to people raised with Internet, Game Consoles, and Smartphones? Pardon me if I sound like an old fart.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by shortscreen on Sunday June 15 2014, @06:01AM

    by shortscreen (2252) on Sunday June 15 2014, @06:01AM (#55511) Journal

    The last several books I've read were all ebooks on my laptop. I'm no stranger to spending hours in front of a computer screen, and I would say it's easier than holding a paper book open anyway.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday June 15 2014, @12:17PM

    by VLM (445) on Sunday June 15 2014, @12:17PM (#55576)

    Something I don't miss at all about "that older tech news site" is it was infested with astroturfers especially e-ink astro turfers such that "real men stare at a screen and read source code for 18 hour days, but a glance at english language text will somehow make their eyes explode Indiana Jones-style". The irony of posting that in English on a website for reading was always lost on them. I hope they made a lot of money from dumb PR departments, however annoying they were.

    Usually followed closely by "my moms basement has a flipped over 5 gallon bucket to sit on and a 40 watt light bulb hanging from the wires on Mom's basement ceiling so that means no one can comfortably read, because I can't". Now that e-ink is pretty much dead we might get some sanity, at least temporarily. Maybe the astroturfing will switch to "retina displays".

    Another good astro-turf meme was ereader apps and kindle app and amazons store are all the same, all one merged together thing and no alternatives are thinkable much less trivially implementeable, trying to create a confuseopoly to push an idea.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by My Silly Name on Sunday June 15 2014, @01:41PM

      by My Silly Name (1528) on Sunday June 15 2014, @01:41PM (#55594)
      Another good astro-turf meme was ereader apps and kindle app and amazons store are all the same, all one merged together thing and no alternatives are thinkable much less trivially implementeable, trying to create a confuseopoly to push an idea.

      I guess that might depend on your point of view. This meme seems to apply (IMO) more in the realm of Linux distros, in the form of a tedious assumption that everybody runs Ubuntu. While there are many who assume that ereaders==kindle devices, there seems to be a healthy number of users of other alternatives.

      I buy ebooks from a variety of sources (according to availability or price) when they are not in the public domain, but I have a policy of stripping any DRM out of them before I transfer them to my (in my case, Sony) ereader. I have read enough horror stories of vendors (i.e. Amazon) yanking content back after purchase.

      Furthermore, the default formatting of publications from the vendor often (usually, in fact) leaves a lot to be desired, so I prefer to tweak them with Sigil [wikipedia.org] before transferring them to my device via Calibre [calibre-ebook.com]. (Yes, I know we can now edit books with the latter, but I have become accustomed to Sigil, which works well for me.)
    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday June 15 2014, @05:20PM

      by HiThere (866) on Sunday June 15 2014, @05:20PM (#55625) Journal

      My empirical study (i.e., my experience) is that I don't like to read more than a page or so of text on a screen, whereas 500 pages in a book isn't daunting. OTOH, I'm talking about computer, not an e-book reader. I understand that those are a very different experience, though I've never got into the habit of using one. (Most of the books I read aren't available as e-books, and I'd worry about permanence. Many of my books are over a decade old.)

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 15 2014, @06:42PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 15 2014, @06:42PM (#55642)

      The irony of posting that in English on a website for reading was always lost on them

      To be fair many of them don't appear to read properly or at all - whether it's the articles, summary or comments. ;)

    • (Score: 1) by archshade on Wednesday June 18 2014, @09:55AM

      by archshade (3664) on Wednesday June 18 2014, @09:55AM (#56856)

      E-ink is dead? I have not seen any big changes recently or even many new products, e-ink seems to have matured rapily to a niche (that it fills well) and nothing new is coming, doesn't mean it's dead yet. I personally prefer reading on an e-reader (Kindle paper white 6"), this does not mean I want an e-ink phone or laptop.

      Although there is a possibility that just something different is good, as I spend most of my day using an LCD screen. I find the screen particularly good for reading in bed because LCD seems to keep me awake. My e-readers battery life is also 25-30x longer than my tablet. This means I don't have to worry about not being able to read if my tablet dies, and not having to waste battery time on reading. For me this is especially useful as I frequently take a coach from Den Haag (NL) to Manchester (UK), a trip that goes down to France across the channel and back up. On these long trips my tablet usually dies before its over (I use it to listen to music and watch videos so).
      I used to use my tablet for reading e-books (Moon Reader) but found that an hour reading(my commute to uni includes a 30min train ride) seemed to really reduce battery life (my tablet is always on and will last a weekend with light use, including context aware networking). I have tried reading on my laptop but It always feels odd (I can't justify this it just does not feel right). I appreciate this seems to draw arbitrary differences because I will read websites, manuals, and data sheets on a laptop.

      It is worth separating out the kindle from Amazons e-book service, I generally read Free(gratis) books usually found though Calibre and have bought ~£5 of books from Amazon (wanted to try it and had a gift card). really the service is to expensive and ownership to transient for my liking.

      There are two things I would like changed on the Kindle

      1. Support for .epub: I often end up converting from .epub to .mobi and the books always get the formatting slightly off (not so it is hard to read but excess white space and odd chapter marks. I use calibre on the fly conversion (seems to work the same as doing it beforehand in Calibre), does anyone know if a tool (needs to run on Debian) that does a better job?
      2. De-columnate pdfs: This one is a pipe dream put I read lots of documents that come as PDFs with two columns. It would be so nice to be able to extract the PDF text (and diagrams) and have it displayed normally on the e-reader. If someone knows how to do this please tell me.

      For me e-reader with e-ink screens have value, I still think there a bit expensive and I would not rush out and buy one if mine broke, I would wait for the sails. I would replace my Tablet immediately and for much more money, which shows that the tablet is more useful. Just because e-ink has little value to you does not mean there is no benefit to anyone. and I sure some of the advocates on the other site were shills. but spending 30 mins reading a website or doing some coding (am I the only one who spends as much time with a scrap of paper and pencil when coding as looking at a monitor) is different to sitting down and reading a novel for an hour.