Deep silliness at the Chronicle: banning all but ebooks

Just in time for a little Thanksgiving levity, The Chronicle publishes an article so deeply silly that it'll do your heart good: "In the 21st-Century University, Let's Ban (Paper) Books". The credits line lists some books that the author has written, including one on our old friend the "digital native," but I'm having a hard time believing that he's ever read any.

First of all, the "digital natives" will have to be "weaned" off physical books, because . . . well, because otherwise how will this guy make any money? they won't be being all modern and 21st century and such. I always thought if technology made life easier, students would use it, because they're rational beings. But if they use physical books because books serve their purposes better? Now, that's just wicked stubborn, and those books have to be taken away, like pacifiers, for their own good.

Leaving aside the issue of paper versus e-form, what about content? Don't worry:

Much of what students need to study is already in the public domain and can easily, in instances where it hasn't already been done, be converted to electronic form. Most contemporary works exist electronically, as do a huge number of historical books and documents. This would be an incentive to scan more of them.

So copyright is no problem? These books are free? "Much" is in the public domain? Well, all right, then! Just point me to the planet where this is true, please.

What about our books? No worries there, either: "Professors would have a limited time in which to convert their personal libraries to all-digital formats, using student helpers who would also record the professors' marginal notes." I love this--"limited time." What happens then? Does Oskar Werner come in and incinerate the rest after the "limited time"? Has this person ever worked at a university where even getting the TPS reports in on time is a major challenge and subject to faculty complaints? Oh, and who's paying for all these student helpers and scanning? Universities in the grip of, in Roxie's phrase, "Excellence Without Money"?

Just in case you haven't got the point yet, there's a rousing scolding waiting for you in the conclusion:

The idea of having one's own personal library of physical books, so useful in earlier times, is no longer worth passing on to our students. ...Academics, researchers, and particularly teachers need to move to the tools of the future. Artifacts belong in museums, not in our institutions of higher learning.

I could tell you what I'd write on a student paper that used (1) sweeping generalizations, (2) illogical leaps of reasoning, (3) irrational and pointless abuse of a perfectly reasonable technology--paper--as "old" and useless, and (4) a complete lack of evidence for the conclusions, but I guess I'd better get busy scanning my notes while I still can.

Do digital natives crave digital books?

We all know the drill: our students love their computers, what with being digital natives and all, so we need to invest heavily in ebooks. Over at IHE, Barbara Fister bravely looks at this particular flavor of heavily-promoted Kool-Aid and discovers something a little different:

This is fresh in my mind because I just attended an interesting day-long virtual conference on ebooks in libraries. In fact, I was a panelist for a session on marketing ebooks to students in academic libraries. Sadly, what I had to say probably wasn’t what the audience came for. Our students aren’t interested in ebooks . . . . I don’t know what students make of all this, but one thing that Project Information Literacy discovered in their latest study is that students are not as excited about gadgetry and electronic sources as we tend to assume. When project teams interviewed 560 undergraduates studying in libraries at ten institutions, they found students were keeping it simple. Most of them had only one or two electronic devices with them: a phone and a laptop. Most of them were focused on getting an assignment done or were studying for a class. Most of them had only a couple of webpages open in a browser, and they weren’t the same websites; they were browsing all over the place. (emphasis added)

This reminds me of the big push to use Facebook in classes a few years back. The thinking was that since students live in Facebookland, they would love love love to have their teachers in there friending them and pushing class-related posts at them in their out-of-class spare time. From articles I've read, students were not exactly thrilled about this togetherness concept dreamed up by dewy-eyed teachers. They understood that a social space was a social space and a learning space was a learning space, and they were okay with having boundaries between the two.

The connection I'm seeing is this: students may live in computerland, as we do, and they certainly communicate with us in that way, but that doesn't mean that they use computers as we do nor should they necessarily want or need to.

We can lead these horses to water, but we ought to stop trying to make them drink--that is, turn them into mini versions of us. Instead of force-feeding them our notions of what they should want based on starry-eyed notions of what "digital natives" do, why don't we pay attention to what they actually want? Sure, we need to expand their horizons beyond enotes and Wikipedia, but we can do that in ways that meet them halfway.

Actually--and this is another heretical thought--I'm starting to wonder if the students use the physical library more than we do. A little anecdata: I was at our library today, as I am most weeks, and it was full of students studying in groups. Once again I was the only faculty-age person there except for a librarian here and there. I know--this proves nothing. Still, I wonder if the atmosphere of the books has at least something to do with it.

That's one small step for MLA, one giant leap for MLA-citers

Update on the quandary about using MLA format to cite from the Kindle (from The Chronicle):

Ms. Feal says the MLA is considering whether to "accommodate" location numbers on the Kindle.

Finally! And may I also say "thanks"?

But wait--there's more!

According to the commenters, the newest software for Kindle can display the real page numbers, too: http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/kindle-books-get-page-numbers-and-social-features/?src=busln

This feature isn't available yet for those using the Kindle app on computers or iPads, apparently. Also, you Nook users must be laughing up your sleeves at the rest of us, because apparently the Nook already has page numbers.

Still, all those Kindle books need to be retrofitted in some way so that the page numbers show, and it's likely that they'll convert Eat Pray Love or Tom Clancy before the critical study that I was thinking about buying today before the "citing locations" problem made me put it back on the virtual shelf.

This still doesn't get past the "it's harder to annotate an e-book" issue, because, well, it just is harder (says the person who has downloaded every imaginable type of book and .pdf reader). But it does start to tip the scales when the choice is "instantaneous download" versus "this book will ship in 6-8 weeks."

E-textbooks (again): students prefer dead tree versions

At the New York Times, Lisa Forderaro expresses surprise that the students at Hamilton College prefer print textbooks to the digital kind (which, she notes correctly, you "rent" instead of buying). Why do the students prefer paper to screens?

• “The screen won’t go blank,” said Faton Begolli, a sophomore from Boston. “There can’t be a virus. It wouldn’t be the same without books. They’ve defined ‘academia’ for a thousand years.”
• “Last semester, I rented for psychology, and it was cheaper. But for something like organic chemistry, I need to keep the book. E-textbooks are good, but it’s tempting to go on Facebook, and it can strain your eyes.”

These seem like sensible answers to me. If even twenty-somethings are feeling eyestrain, that's good to know.

Also, as Forderaro says, "Many students are reluctant to give up the ability to flip quickly between chapters, write in the margins and highlight passages, although new software applications are beginning to allow students to use e-textbooks that way." This doesn't seem to dissuade the digital true believer, though:

“Students grew up learning from print books,” said Nicole Allen, the textbooks campaign director for the research groups, “so as they transition to higher education, it’s not surprising that they carry a preference for a format that they are most accustomed to.”

This is true but not true, and, paired with the idea about writing in margins, flipping through the books, etc., suggests that students are somehow not thinking clearly but clinging blindly to an old tool.

Hold on a minute. Aren't students the people most likely to try out a new format and discard the old one if they decide it's more useful, and haven't they done this repeatedly with various technologies and practices, right down to the sophisticated methods of plagiarism that we all complain about? Except for the comment about books defining academia, which shows a quite admirable sentiment, all of the objections have nothing to do with "don't want to change what I'm used to" and everything to do with "the e-textbooks just don't work as well for me."

I don't think they're being resistant. I think they're making a rational choice about what works best for them.

The line of reasoning that considers resistance to using a particular technology as a particular kind of obstinacy reminds of other experiments (not to mention the hilarious Professor Pushbutton machine that Historiann found). Does Duke still give out iPods to its freshman class? Is Reed College continuing with its KindleDX program?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't experiment with these technologies; we should, and we should keep trying. But we should also be willing to see that if they don't work well, it's not a statement about resistance to technology but about using the appropriate tool for the job.

iPad as classroom text reader: a thought experiment

As I've done more reading on the iPad, I've wondered what it might be like to use it in a literature classroom. I'm inspired partly by the posts over at Teaching, Learning, and Living with an iPad, a site that's chronicling a writing class in which all the students received iPads. Some thoughts:

• Reading on the iPad is nice. It hasn't been hard on the eyes, and the page-turning capabilities are a lot faster than those on the Kindles I've seen. Like the Kindle, it has a dictionary function, a notes function, etc.
• As it currently exists, the iPad has one advantage over a standard netbook or laptop if you use it in the classroom: no multitasking. Wait--that really is a feature and not a bug, since students wouldn't be able to Facebook while you're hoping they're following the text. That feature will disappear with the next system update, however.
• The down side is that students wouldn't be able to keep a text open and write their notes beside the text, which in an ideal world they would be doing instead of Facebooking.
• The book situation wouldn't work as it does for the tech writing class. First, in testing various e-textbooks over this past year, I learned you don't "buy" an e-textbook in the sense that you keep it permanently (or sell it back to the bookstore); you rent it for a specific period of time, usually one semester or maybe 6 months. This costs about 80% of what it would cost to buy the book. This isn't necessarily good or bad, but since lit students, unlike students in the sciences or tech writing, may want to keep their books for later reference, buying an e-textbook wouldn't make sense unless you're teaching a contemporary author whose works are under copyright.
  
• The good part about an e-textbook is that it's designed for use in a class and has navigation features like a table of contents with links, which would make navigating to specific sections easier.
  
• The good part about not using an e-textbook is that, if you're teaching a pre-1923 literature class, you'd have lots of public domain choices for texts. If you're using a text that doesn't have significant problems with/variations in editions, Project Gutenberg has lots of works formatted for Kindle, which would work on an iPad.
  
• These books wouldn't have the navigation features of a purchased e-textbook, however, and here's where mcconeghy's response to a previous post might provide a solution. Imagine that you're in class. Maybe you'd usually say something like, "Turn to page 127. How has Dorothea Brooke's perspective changed since her comment on page 45?" and you'd expect the students to be able to flip back and forth between the two. Since it'd take a while to do that on an iPad, and there aren't any page numbers anyway, couldn't you say "search for 'red bows on blue dress'" or something like that to get students to find both instances of the phrase? Couldn't the search function replace the flipping pages function?
  
• I'm a good typist, and I have small hands, but the iPad keyboard is still a challenge. It might be a challenge for students as well--any thoughts?
  
• Also, as a sad testament to the increasing irrelevance of the apostrophe, the iPad has put it on the numbers keyboard, so you have shift to that keyboard if you want to use a contraction or a possessive form. It could be that students would get faster at shifting between keyboards, or it could be that we all will start using no contractions at all and talking like Mafia dons ("I do not think he would like to sleep with the fishes"), or--best guess--R.I.P. apostrophes.[Edited to add this: Emily says in the comments that an iPod touch automatically adds the apostrophe. I just checked, and the iPad does, too. Thanks, Emily!]
  

Thoughts?

[Edited to add: I realize, too, that the whole thing would be easier just using a paper book. There should be a universal rule: whenever you have to use the concept of a workaround, the original method of using the tool/technology is probably better in the first place.]

Today's Koan: If a reference can't be cited using MLA, does it really exist?

If a reference can't be cited using MLA (or Chicago), does it really exist?

For example, say you have a Kindle or an iPad. I've been given an iPad as a present--yay!--so let's stick with that as an example. You can download books from the Kindle store on Amazon.com, if you put the free Kindle app on your iPad. You can also buy or download books from the iBooks store, including free public domain ones. The thing that doesn't come along with these nifty editions is a set of page numbers that corresponds to the page numbers in the original text.

That's not a problem with .pdf documents, since they're images of the original. You can read them and, since Sept. 30, annotate them using the GoodReader app, or read and annotate them using iAnnotate. You can copy text from the .pdf and paste it into Docs-to-Go.

So far, I like the experience of reading on the iPad. If you have a book with endnotes, for example, the endnotes are links, so you can click on the note and then click back to the text. You can write notes in both the Kindle and iBooks apps, although I haven't explored that much because it's harder than I thought it would be to type on the screen-based keyboard.

What if you want to cite a book that you've downloaded? Kindle books--for scholarly books, anyway--cost about the same as the paperback edition, and they cost more than a used copy, so if I'm going to shell out the money for one, I want to be sure that I don't need to get another copy.

The piece of advice I've found most often is "go get a print copy of the book, find the citation, and cite the page." This is probably the best advice for now, but it's a colossal timewaster and a duplication of effort to have to hunt up the book if you've already bought it. If the book is in Google Books, you could try searching for the phrase in there, but a lot of books aren't in Google Books.

APA has addressed this by suggesting that you cite is as you would any unpaginated material: "Name the major sections (chapter, section, and paragraph number; abbreviate if titles are long), like you would do if you were citing the Bible or Shakespeare." Since paragraphs aren't numbered, I would be less than thrilled to have to scroll through and count the paragraphs just so I could cite the reference. And what about paratextual elements such as epigraphs? Do they count as paragraphs when you're counting?

Some other sources suggest that you cite the Kindle location number, which would be swell if the editor of the journal you're submitting to has a Kindle and not so much otherwise.

The Chicago Manual of Style suggests just citing the Kindle edition and maybe the chapter number.

The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Seventh Edition floats above the fray by saying (in 5.7.18) that you should just say what kind of file it is: "Microsoft Word file, JPEG file" or whatever. Presumably you could say "Kindle file" or "iBooks file" there, too, although all of the examples given are for short pieces. That wouldn't provide much information if you were trying to cite from a book-length source. As EduKindle asks, "Why is it so hard to cite a passage on a Kindle?"

Beats me. I'll be happy when MLA gets this straightened out, almost as happy as I'll be when they decide to jettison those #@%$& angle brackets that they make you put around a URL (see 5.6.1) as though we'd all just stare helplessly at an http:// prefix without knowing it was a web address unless it was safely contained in a set of angle brackets. [Edited to add: tenthmedieval has a good explanation for this in the comments.]

Print books and e-books again

The New York Times asks "Do School Libraries Need Books?" in a recent issue. Some snippets:

1. James Tracey, headmaster of Cushing Academy (which pretty much said "no, in thunder!" in answer to this question), is still a no-books enthusiast but says that students "need more help from librarians to navigate these resources, so we have also increased our library staff by 25 percent." Wait, what? I thought the point of school was to teach students to think and to find materials for themselves rather than to foster an increased dependence on librarians.

2. I'm more with Matthew G. Kirshenbaum on this one:

Even the grossest physical failings of books and libraries, the maddening frustration of the book that is lost or checked out just when you need it most can instill an important lesson: knowledge is proximate. In the digital world, that proximity is less about geographical locale than about licensing, digital rights management, and affordability; but all the more reason for students (and teachers) to know that not everything is always within reach of a mouse.

3. Steve Kolowich at Inside Higher Ed gives a well-reasoned but not especially hopeful update on the "let's kill all the libraries" movement: “The administrators who provide library budgets may be reluctant to fund new facilities to house print collections and may question large expenditures to support both print and electronic formats." My not-especially-helpful reaction is that we could support a lot more books if we got rid of administrators who thought like this.

4. Although I don't condone book abuse, I've known people (ahem) who have done the following at various times out of carelessness or necessity:

• dropped them
• tossed them in the back of a car where they were unaffected by the hot sun pouring down through the windows
• used them as spider-killers
• rested laptops on top of them
• used them as a handy writing desk
• scribbled phone numbers and directions in the back
• read them in the bathtub and dropped them in the water by mistake, leaving said book's pages to blossom out like a giant flower radiating from the spine when they dry.

If you drop a book, you still have a book. If you drop a Kindle, Sony, Nook, or their kindred, you have a brick.

(I don't have anything to add about the Huntsville tragedy, but please read Historiann and University Diaries for some useful commentary.)

Update on the "bookless library"

Two items from today's news.

1. From The Chronicle (behind the subscription wall--sorry) (now free, as JHoward notes in the comments; thanks, Chronicle!):

In Face of Professors' 'Fury,' Syracuse U. Library Will Keep Books on Shelves
By Jennifer Howard
A fight between humanities scholars and the library at Syracuse University over plans to send books to a remote storage facility has reached a temporary truce, with both sides agreeing to consider alternative solutions. The conflict began several weeks ago when the library announced it wanted to free up shelf space and save money by sending some of its print collection to a facility in Patterson, N.Y.
. . .
The reaction was so fierce because of the high value humanities researchers still place on hands-on browsing, Mr. Watts said. "The big issue in the letters and among humanists generally is the importance of being able to browse collections and not have them in a remote location," he said. Recent library renovations to create more computer and work space have caused books to be moved around, according to Mr. Watts, and "part of the fury has been fueled by what looks like the emptying of shelves."
. . .
[L]ast night, more than 200 students and faculty members attended a meeting of the University Senate to hash out the library situation, according to the university's student newspaper, The Daily Orange.

The senate meeting "was the most longest and most vocal in years," Suzanne E. Thorin, the university's dean of libraries, told The Chronicle. "It means there's a lot of burning passion on this." Humanities faculty members have made it clear they consider the library their "central laboratory," she said.

Yes, exactly: a "central laboratory." I don't have anything to add to this except to hope that the 200+ people who turned out have convinced Dean Thorin that (1) we're not just random kooks who have an unhealthy attachment to books and that (2) print culture isn't dead yet.

2. About print culture: over at Perplexed with Narrow Passages, Christopher Vilmar has a good post about Robert Darnton's thoughts on e-books versus printed books. A few excerpts:

The book is not dead.

As new electronic devices arrive on the market, we think we have been precipitated into a new era. We tout “the Information Age” as if information did not exist in the past.

Whatever the future may be, it will be digital.

Unless the vexatious problem of digital preservation is solved, all texts “born digital” belong to an endangered species. The obsession with developing new media has inhibited efforts to preserve the old.

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. "Digital" is the future, but the future isn't here yet. We need both print and digital media right now. I'm hoping that conversations like the ones linked to here will increase our understanding. Didn't we learn anything from deconstruction? Both/and, not either/or.

Boston Globe: A library without the books

From the Boston Globe, with some interruptions by me.

Cushing Academy (yearly tuition: $42,850) is getting rid of its books:

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. . . . We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’

And learn to spout clichéd language like "shape emerging trends and optimize technology"?

Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

I know how Cushing Academy can save $500,000: put in a Starbucks instead. What's the difference? And that way they won't have to train the erstwhile "information specialists" to be baristas, too.

Tracy and other administrators said the books took up too much space and that there was nowhere else on campus to stock them. So they decided to give their collection - aside from a few hundred children’s books and valuable antiquarian works - to local schools and libraries.

“We see the gain as greater than the loss,’’ said Gisele Zangari, chairwoman of the math department, who like other teachers has plans for all her students to do their class reading on electronic books by next year. “This is the start of a new era.’’

And students mark up these books how, exactly? But not everyone is happy with the Brave New World:

“Unless every student has a Kindle and an unlimited budget, I don’t see how that need is going to be met,’’ Fiels said. “Books are not a waste of space, and they won’t be until a digital book can tolerate as much sand, survive a coffee spill, and have unlimited power."

So far we agree. But wait--there's more:

"When that happens, there will be next to no difference between that and a book.’’

Here's a test: Anyone out there still have a book on a 5 1/4" floppy disk, suitable for reading in the drive on your x286 processor Windows 3.1 system computer? How about a book on a 3" misnamed "floppy disk" or a Zip disk? Still have them? I do. How often do you read them? Daily? Weekly? Never?

How often do you read from books on paper that are over 100 years old? Daily? Weekly? More than you read the books on computer disks?

But of course reading old books on paper doesn't "shape emerging trends" or "prioritize the ramfoozle" or whatever the currently fashionable phrase is.

I know I've ranted about this before. But this is something that deserves a rant every time.

When is a book not a book?

From Pogue at the New York Times:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

The best part? In a plot development that would have any creative writing teacher saying "Can't you be a little less obvious in your symbolism?" the deleted book is (wait for it). . . 1984.

So you can't trust a Kindle edition, huh? Well, thank goodness for paper editions.

As the late Billy Mays might say, "BUT WAIT--THERE'S MORE."

Scribner's has just reissued Hemingway's A Moveable Feast in a "new and improved" version by Hemingway's grandson. The blurb at Audible.com says that the original edition was cobbled together by Mary Hemingway out of fragments and doesn't represent Hemingway's intentions.

Not so fast, says A. E. Hotchner, a Hemingway friend who was there when Hemingway retrieved the notebooks that formed the basis for the work, discussed the work in progress, and ultimately read the manuscript on the way to delivering it to Scribner's: "When I was leaving for New York to give the manuscript to the editor of Life, Ernest also gave me the completed manuscript of the Paris book to give to Scribner’s president, Charles Scribner Jr. I recount this history of “A Moveable Feast” to demonstrate how involved Ernest was with it, and that the manuscript was not left in shards but was ready for publication."

It's hard not to think of this in terms of other works changed after the author's death: Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, John Lennon's demo versions of a song later issued as "Real Love," and even cartoons and movies from which embarrassing racial representations have been silently excised and sent down the memory hole. The thing is, though, that we have to make choices about these editions all the time when we order editions for our classes. Because they exist in physical form, both versions exist.

But with the Kindle, it's possible to make the whole book disappear even after you've bought it. If that can happen, it should also be possible to remove (wirelessly and silently) a version of a text that had been downloaded but had some flaws--typos, for example. I'm not saying that correcting flaws is a bad thing, but if that can happen, it's also possible to change other things about a text--remove a passage or term that appeared in the paper version but has been deemed too offensive for modern sensibilities, for example. The issue is that this can be done silently, without warning, even after we think we've ordered a stable edition for class.

Time and Hemingway scholars will sort out the issue of the "improved" paper edition of A Moveable Feast. One or the other will disappear, or both will be required. But the disappearing 1984 edition? Amazon says it won't ever disappear books from users' Kindles again for problems with a Kindle edition. Honest. No kidding. You can trust us, says Jeff Bezos. But I still think the whole issue of having a stable, authoritative edition just took not a small step, but a giant leap toward complexity.

New MLA Handbook: Print. Print. Print. Print.

Ink asked an excellent question in the comments, so rather than hijack my own comments section, I'll write about it here:

I just heard about that yesterday and I don't really understand what is wrong with print being viewed as default...is it not PC, somehow? I don't have the new version yet, so maybe it's explained in great detail.

Frankly, I just don't want to type "Print" a billion times on my Works Cited. Especially since we're all trying to go green and that just makes the bibliographies longer...sigh.

I hadn't thought about the longer bibliographies issue, but Ink is absolutely right. Maybe the MLA thinks that taking away its requirement for long URL citations will balance that out. The MLA giveth, and the MLA taketh away. And once the varieties of e-readers (Sony, Kindle, Kindle reader for iPhone, and the various tablet readers that are on the way) get involved, I suspect that the MLA Handbook, and our bibliographies, are about to get a whole lot longer.

The MLA thought (and still thinks) it was important to specify the database, so we all do that, even though it seems unnecessary if you're citing a .pdf version of a print journal. Aren't they photographically identical? At least in the new version, you don't have to specify which library site you were in when you accessed JSTOR or EBSCO, which is an improvement (See 5.6.4). I can also see the necessity of specifying "Print" for the sciences, since so much of what they do is online, or for specialists in digital media areas within the humanities.

But for plain vanilla literature and literary history people? How many of the books you actually use, including new books, are available in any complete form online? (I don't mean Google's book snippets; they don't count.) In my field, that figure is about 3 out of 100, and I've looked assiduously (questia.com, netlibrary.com, books for the Kindle, etc.) to find books available in this form. Believe me, if they were available online, I'd be throwing money at them, since it would be so convenient to have them online.

Are there enough books online to justify this new MLA requirement of "Print" after what may turn out to be 97% of the books in a bibliography? What about the books you use; are they online enough to make this necessary?

[Updated to add: check out Ink's satiric post on this issue (link is above).]

Sven Birkerts mourns loss of cuneiform, clay tablets

I have a confession to make: despite all the rational reasons for not getting a Kindle, I have been reading far too many reviews of the new version and lingering over pictures and videos of the Kindle 2 in action. "Rational reasons" can't entirely stamp out the lingering techno-envy best expressed by "Shiny! Want it!'

So Sven Birkerts's "Resisting the Kindle" in The Atlantic ought to supply some more ammunition for rationality, shouldn't it? I thought so until I read this in a passage where Birkerts is bemoaning the ability to access the internet and look up something using a Blackberry, claiming that such an ability "abets the decimation of context":

Literature—our great archive of human expression—is deeply contextual and historicized. We all know this—we learned it in school. This essential view of literature and the humanities has been—and continues to be—reinforced by our libraries and bookstores, by the obvious physical adjacency of certain texts, the fact of which telegraphs the cumulative time-bound nature of the enterprise. We get this reflexively. . . .
That is the trade-off. Access versus context. As for Pride and Prejudice—Austen’s words will reach the reader’s eye in the same sequence they always have. What will change is the receiving sensibility, the background understanding of what this text was – how it emerged and took its place in the context of other texts—and how it moved through the culture.

Here are the problems with that argument:

1. Umm, Mr. Birkerts? That ability to look things up instantly? Not going away any time soon.

2. Also, wouldn't the ability to look things up help to PROVIDE rather than erase context? Doesn't access enable context rather than erasing it?

3. And having a little knowledge about context creates a desire for more, doesn't it? That's why (trumpet flourish) investing in the humanities is a smart idea. "Context of other texts" and "how it moved through the culture"--wait, what's that murmur? Why, it's a chorus of humanities professors saying, "That's what we do! If you want to learn more, we have a wealth of information to share with you, and we want to hear your ideas, too!" For example, I've seen various history blogs make gentle fun of the History Channel enthusiasts out there, but honestly, doesn't the History Channel (at least until it eschewed history for "Haunted History" or "UFO History" or "Big Shiny Man-Gadget History" or whatever it's doing now) help to nudge people toward history courses?

4. Birkerts envisions this context as being transmitted through libraries and bookstores as people scan the books on the shelves. Now, nobody loves browsing in libraries and independent bookstores more than I do, but this option presupposes (1) the leisure to hang out in libraries and bookstores; (2) an acculturation process that values and promotes such an activity; and, for the bookstore, (3) the money to buy books.

I somehow don't think he's envisioning the kind of chain bookstore where Ten Things I Learned from My Dog Morley or Addiction Memoir Confidential or The 365-Day Cat Golfing Calendar are the featured big sellers. Here again is class privilege in action: he's picturing a big-city library or independent bookstore experience for people who have the leisure and means to appreciate it and the cultural tools, granted by a humanities education, to understand what they're looking at.

So the Kindle isn't the problem. Even a dead-tree book won't have the proper context unless there's some kind of additional learning involved. The answer isn't to fret about the Kindle and wish ourselves back in time; it's to support the humanities that make that context possible.

Two takes on e-textbooks (from the Chronicle)

In the Chronicle (behind the subscription wall--sorry) this week are two articles on e-textbooks, and I have a problem with both of them.

The first one explains that teachers in an education course have had their students create a wiki instead of buying a textbook ("Is Higher Education Ready to Switch to Digital Course Materials?"), which may be a great model in education classes. But this made me come to a full stop:

Only 20 years ago, a university's reputation was in large part measured by the quality and extent of its library. Now many students have access at home to more information than even the greatest academic library contains. Not only is more information available, but our tools of access are becoming exponentially better — and those improvements are taking place constantly. Academe has yet to acknowledge how such trends are changing the educational process.

Now, I do believe strongly in the value of student-created materials like wikis, but when it came to this paragraph, the authors lost me. Say what? We don't need libraries now because we have access to "more information than even the greatest academic library contains"? Really? Really?. Again, maybe this is true for what they teach in education classes; I don't know about that and can't say. But to apply this to any kind of MLA field is, to put it politely, a whopper.


The second article is Mark Nelson's "Is Higher Education Ready to Switch to Digital Course Materials? The Cost of Textbooks Is Driving Electronic Solutions."

Each year one of the biggest debates in higher education seems to be: Is this the year that electronic textbooks take off? Many of the barriers are falling. E-reader devices are getting better. The inventory of digital content is expanding. Business models are emerging to support the needs of students, faculty members, and publishers. People are getting more comfortable with new modes of information delivery and the pervasiveness of technology in our lives. Discussions of the future of digital course materials are now more often about "when" than "if." . . . . Among the early adopters of e-textbooks are for-profit universities like the University of Phoenix, where most textbooks are delivered digitally, and all but a small fraction of students use e-books rather than print versions.

Leaving aside the "as the University of Phoenix goes, so goes the nation" idea (it's an online university; it makes sense that its books are delivered in that way, too), Nelson isn't wrong about the basic idea. I've done a little searching for e-textbooks, however, and they have a few drawbacks:
1. They're almost as expensive as the regular versions.
2. You rent them: that is, they expire after a period of time.
3. You can't mark them up easily.

Here's my counterproposal for "business model to fit the needs of students": free.
1. If you teach texts are out of copyright, you create a reading list based on Google books or Gutenberg (if there's a good text there).
2. Everybody brings a netbook or laptop to class and works from that. Better still: maybe a tablet notebook or laptop so that they can mark up .pdf files. If you require this, however, you end up with the problem of money and access to equipment, since not all students will have these. Heck, I don't have a tablet notebook, either.

The drawbacks, however, are the same as those for the e-textbooks.
1. Even if the reading is short and you've formatted it to be as tree-friendly as possible, students will not print it out.
2. Students can't mark up the text.
3. All the internet deficit disorders that we've been talking about for years will distract attention from the class discussion.

E-books again, with a British flavour

I'm still thinking about the "art of the job letter" post I want to write, but in the "the medium is the message" category, this item in The Independent caught my attention this morning. The writer, John Walsh, mentions Nicholas Carr's essay in The Atlantic earlier this year and then moves on to practical matters:

The instructions tell you, "One battery charge is equal to 6,800 page turns (that's enough to read War and Peace five times over on a single charge!)" Yeah, right. But it's not going to happen on the Sony Reader. Nobody is ever going to read Tolstoy on this fatuous device. It's an electronic simulation of a page, but it'll never convince you it's a book, to be read by your sentient eyes and brain. It doesn't have the solidity, the pages, the tactile companionship of a book. You'll never know where you are in the story, or how much of it is left. You won't have the cover artwork, to steal inside your head and become a lifelong reminder of the book it encased.

And you can't turn the pages. I spent half an hour reading Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (the first book to be installed) with my fingers itching to turn a page; "turn" one electronically, and the screen goes blank before the next page is displayed. It's a nasty moment, the screen going blank and interrupting your train of thought; but it's a good metaphor for the blankness to which our minds are tending, as we gradually lose the ability to interpret the old world of sequential thoughts in the new blizzard of information retrieval.

I hadn't thought about the "you don't know where you are" issue before in quite this way, though I've been interested in the Kindle for a while.

Everyone I've talked to or have read about who has a Kindle or Sony Reader loves it. Loves it. Wouldn't be without it. It's light, it's handy, and it isn't a burden to carry. Professor Z also had a good point about the backlight feature of the Kindle being handy if you're in a place with sporadic electricity. If you have a Kindle, you can get the books instantly. When you talk to people about what they like, however, it's almost always the ability to carry around popular or contemporary literary fiction for dull moments: airplane rides, train rides, waiting for the bus.

Walsh notes that while Booker Prize-winning books used to fly off the shelves, now difficult fiction by authors like Adam Mars-Jones or Anne Enright doesn't sell as much as he thinks it should or as much as he thinks it used to. He finds it hard to imagine that anyone would read War and Peace or difficult literary fiction on this device. But is this the fault of the device, the fault of the culture, or both?

And is "fault" too strong a word to use for this idea? At the end of a long day, even academics don't always say, "Okay, I'm finished with grading, committee meetings, reading a lot of academic prose, writing, and whatever else goes into a long day. Since this is the one night out of the week I don't have more work to do after dinner, I can't wait to dive into a 1,050-page novel with lots of convoluted syntax and highly symbolic imagery, one that comments on and interrupts itself incessantly." Do we say this? What we're likely to dive into is (in descending order) (1) a book related to research, but not necessarily criticism; (2) a classic novel we've always meant to read; (3) books we've read before, soothing books that can drown out the din of "you still haven't done this!" lists in our heads; and (4) magazines, light books, web pages, and blogs. Insofar as the e-book devices foster this kind of reading, maybe Walsh has a point. Or maybe we would be doing this kind of reading with or without the e-book device.

Books: not dead yet!

The New York Times can't get enough of quoting--and refuting--Steve Jobs on the Kindle and the death of the book. In case you've been under a rock and haven't seen the Jobs quotation, here it is:
"It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”

The latest response is by Randall Strauss, a professor of business at San Jose State. After the inevitable "we do too read, so there!" statistics, he says something interesting:

The book world has always had an invisible asset that makes up for what it lacks in outsize revenue and profits: the passionate attachment that its authors, editors and most frequent customers have to books themselves. Indeed, in this respect, avid book readers resemble avid Mac users.

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell.

It seems to me that Strauss has two kinds of "books" in mind here: the physical, dead-tree object that people are as passionate about as Mac users are about Macs, and the "object we are accustomed to calling a book," which exists somewhere between cyberspace and the reader's eye. What this separation does is raise more questions than answers about Steve Jobs's comment:

A lot of us are passionate about books, the dead-tree physical object that makes us as obsessed as Mac owners. Is it this kind of readership/ownership that Jobs is talking about when he says that people don't read books any more?

Does the second kind, the book "stripped of its physical shell," count for anything? Does Steve Jobs mean that, say, an online version of Jane Eyre doesn't count as a book? For that matter, if I listen to it on my iPod, as I listen to a lot of books, it's still a book, isn't it?

And does reading necessarily mean reading a book? That's important for the Kindle with its downloading-on-the-fly capabilities, but is the Internet maybe also a book?

How are we defining a book, anyway? I'd be willing to bet that more people are voluntarily writing--if not reading--now than they used to 25 years ago, if only so they can weigh in on fanboy sites and opine about the latest troubles of Britney Spears. I don't say it's good writing, but it is writing, and I'm about the thousandth person to observe that more people have a voice and a larger audience for that voice than ever before because of blogs, fan sites, newsgroups, and the rest.

For the record, I like my books served up dead-tree style, with a side order of interesting -looking covers and decent fonts, so that I can mark them up and find things. (No SEARCH function on a Kindle can be as fast as my blizzard of Post-It notes stuck to pages.) But I'm willing to recognize that that's an old-school, increasingly esoteric notion, as evidenced by the few students I've had who bring laptops with the texts online instead.

Maybe what Steve Jobs is really saying is that a taste for reading books on paper is what's passé and that those of us who like them are going the way of eccentric button collectors in an age of zippers.

On e-books and textbooks

Maybe as a result of lugging, sorting, reshelving (and dusting--let's not forget dusting) all the books I organized this week, I've become transfixed by stories about Kindle, the new e-book reader from Amazon. The great Toni Morrison endorses it, and I can see why.

Pros:

Unlike the Sony reader, the Kindle has a keyboard and allows you to make notes on the text.

Apparently you can download Project Gutenberg texts as well as the 88,000 books at Amazon, though for .pdf files you will have to convert them to a readable format.

You can get books on the fly, through a wireless connection, without having to download and import them.

Cons:

It doesn't allow you to read things in .pdf format (although some conversions are possible).

Books are about $9.99, which is about $5.00 too expensive, IMHO. Since there's no paper involved, why are e-books so expensive generally?

If I drop the Kindle, I've just bought myself a $399 brick paperweight. Yes, you read the price right.

Over the years, when asked by publishers whether I'd consider adopting an e-book, I've always said no because (1) the students couldn't annotate it and (2) they wouldn't be able to bring it to class with them. A device like this might change things, though, since students wouldn't be able to say that they'd forgotten their book that day, especially if their books for all their classes were on a Kindle.

On the other hand, there are still some drawbacks.

(1) It's still more work to open a window and type a comment than to scribble one in the margins. And what about the random markings (circling the names of places and characters, for example, or lines and check marks by an important passage) that help readers to remember and find things in a text?
(2) Would students want a book that they couldn't sell back to the bookstore? Only information stored in physical media (CD, printed books) can be transferred to another person in any legal and meaningful way.
(3) However fast the electronic pages refresh themselves, an e-book can't reproduce the experience of skipping forward and back in a text. Sometimes the feeling of a book is what you want. For example, flipping through a big chunk o' pages and scanning the text for a word, or even the pattern of the paragraphs, can often get you where you want to be, even though printed books don't have a search feature. (I know, I know: it's called an index, but novels don't have them.)
(4) What about the charms of seeing your own childish handwriting (with thoughts to match) on a book that you owned back in the day?
(5) I'm willing to bet that one of these devices wouldn't last a student for his or her whole college career, although a laptop might.

Does anyone have one of these? Does anyone WANT one of these? I confess that I kind of want one, and if it were $99 instead of $399, I might be tempted.