Who Needs Books?

Naomi Baron’s Reading Onscreen argues that the value of digital reading depends on the kind of reading you’re doing: “digital reading is fine for many short pieces or for light content we don’t intend to analyze or reread.” But “eReading is less well suited for many longer works or even for short ones requiring serious thought.”

In part, Baron’s point is simply empirical. She cites many studies that indicate how people distinguish reading onscreen from reading a book. For instance, “Ziming Liu at San Jose State University compared reading behavior onscreen versus in hardcopy. Study participants (graduate students and working professionals) devoted more time to browsing and scanning, and to reading selectively, when working onscreen than when reading print. Subjects also reported that their onscreen reading was less in-depth than with hardcopy.”

Why should this be? What do you lose by reading a serious book onscreen? It partly has to do with book technology: You can flip back and forth with ease, reminding yourself of earlier parts of the argument or story, comparing one passage to another. Zig-zag is essential to deep, close reading, and e-reading tends to inhibit it: It’s straight-line, forward-moving. It’s partly the fact that many of the screens we read on are on devices that interrupt our reading. Our tablets remind us of emails or Tweets, and so we don’t keep our minds on what we’re reading as much. We become practitioners of what Baron calls “hyper-attention.” Overall, e-books are not conducive to reading works as connected wholes.

The most important implication of Baron’s argument, though, is more phenomenological than pragmatic. If books were only machines for conveying information, e-books and books would be all but interchangeable. Books, though, communicate through the whole body; reading a book is not merely an intellectual but a sensory experience, as we feel the heft of the volume and the texture of the page (she cites someone’s estimate that the data of 3500 books on an e-reading weighs a billionth of a billionth of a gram), smell the ink and the aging, hear the crinkle of pages turned. Baron quotes Julia Keller: “Google can’t provide the goose bumps that go along with being in the presence of a 14th Century book.”

You won’t ever find a pressed flower in your e-book, or a love letter from your great-grandmother to your great-grandfather. For years, I’ve had a 10 ruble bill in my Bible; every time I come across it, I say a prayer for my friends in Russia. Can’t do that with my Kindle.

Some of Baron’s arguments are more driven by sentiment than reason, but that’s part of her point: Reading isn’t simply an activity of the reason, and in that respect books present a quite different experience than electronic media.

Baron summarizes some of the remarkable results of brain studies of reading. As she says, “Since the neural tools for reading are cobbled together from structures designed for other purposes, it is not surprising that reading activates areas related to what the text is about. Say you are reading a scene in a novel in which the hero is running to escape the villain. As you read, the motor area of your brain lights up—even though you’re curled up in a chair, not moving. . . . Besides motor area activity associated with action stories, there’s evidence that the olfactory area of the cortex lights up when you see words like ‘perfume’ or ‘coffee,’ and that when you read metaphors involving texture such as ‘He had leathery hands,’ the sensory cortex is activated. There is even evidence that when reading about the lives of others (real or imagined), the brain neurologically registers our attempts to figure out what characters think and feel, and to identify with them.”

Baron’s stated aim is to “move beyond arguments of nostalgia and habit to figuring out what it is about print and digital platforms that leads us to read on them in particular ways.” Her book is full of summaries of research, evidence from her own surveys of students, and reflections on the phenomenology of reading. By distinguishing different types of reading and different types of texts, she is able to admit the utility and benefits of e-reading while stressing the losses incurred by the abandonment of books.