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Is Always On Tech Destroying Our Ability To Read?

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

Appalbarry writes:

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 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.)
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