Brave new reader

It’s heavy. It doesn’t have Flash, let alone a camera. It doesn’t allow multitask.

I was well aware of all these technical criticisms of the iPad when I went to check it out myself last weekend at the 5th Avenue Apple Store. Indeed, it was awkwardly too bulky to be the bigger version of the iPhone but not advanced enough to serve as a casual version of the laptop. It wasn’t until I came across the iBook feature that I started to think seriously about the social and philosophical implications of this product and others—Amazon’s Kindle, for example. Simulating the gesture of flipping pages of a digitized book on the smooth, shiny screen, I wondered whether paper-made books are gradually becoming the endangered species of industrialization.

Hegel would explain the growth of the eBook, the popularity of the Kindle, and the emergence of the iBook feature on the iPad as embodiments of the Zeitgeist, or the cultural climate of the time. From Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1439, all the way to the birth of the personal computer in the late 1970s and the Internet in the 1990s, the book industry has progressed in tune with the available media to the point that about 12 million books have been digitized by Google, and the full content of most of them is currently open to the public. Thus, it makes perfect sense for popular gadgets like the iPad to reflect this technological phenomenon and promote reading digital books.

This is all very democratic and eco-friendly, giving the people cost-efficient access to all sorts of literature without chopping down poor trees. “I look to the diffusion of light and education,” said Thomas Jefferson, “as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man.” In a way, digitization of texts accomplishes this diffusion most productively. In practice, more and more schools are encouraging students to study from digitized textbooks, and a digital publisher named CourseSmart launched an iPhone application last summer “that allows students to read their library of textbooks on the go.”

A utilitarian would love this technological and social development that provides words, words, words to as many people as possible. The increase in the number of people exposed to literature due in large part to digitization means a decrease in illiteracy. More people will become well-read, a quality that seems to come in handy for cocktail parties and other social venues where, according to T.S. Eliot, “the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.”

But depending on the way this digitized book is viewed, whether it be on a laptop or an iPad, the reading experience may be prone to negative consequences that ultimately lower the ceiling of literacy.

On the iPad, the digital book is merely another “App,” which shows that the value of reading books is merely that of a substitutable, miscellaneous activity like checking e-mail or playing Solitaire. “The device does so many different things so well,” writes technology commentator Paul Carr, “that there’s a constant urge when you’re using one to do something else. Two or three pages into a book, you’re already wondering whether you’ve got new mail, or whether anyone has atted you on Twitter.”

An anonymous 21-year-old writing an online technology column urged future authors to write books as though they were “Apps” on the iPad. Among his suggestions, he writes, “Why not make it like a game so that in order to get to the next ‘chapter’ you need to pass a test?” Basically, reading would be motivated not by the pure desire to read, but by the excitement of being able to satisfy the addictive need for constant entertainment in the most efficient way possible, much like the way people browse through short videos on YouTube.

Seduced by the media into buying an iPad, convinced of the financial and moral benefits of digital books, the potential literary genius will start to read the first few pages of a Lit Hum novel when he becomes distracted by the other iPad features that ironically cause a gradual shortening of the user’s attention span, giving way to an infinite loop of distractions.

As technology keeps progressing, as liberals and environmentalists continue to succeed in convincing us of the moral benefits of the mass digitization of books, and as our “multitasking” habits on the computer systematically shorten our attention spans, the eventual digital takeover of paper-made books seems inevitable. You, however, still have a choice. Smell the old paper books in the Butler stacks, embrace the elitist pleasure of focusing on the apparently expensive and inconvenient document, and consider the heaviness of that textbook to be a reflection of its rich content. Or, go along with the Zeitgeist and have fun perpetually entertaining yourself with a digital sheet.

Yurina Ko is a Barnard College junior majoring in philosophy. She is a senior editor of the Columbia Political Review. 2+2=5 runs alternate Wednesdays.