Comment by squeaky-clean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by squeaky-clean | Hacker News Reader

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>Reading is different, you constantly touch it, smell it, look at the paper and ink.

Aside from looking at the ink, none of these things actually have to do with reading. They're all things that deal with paper. I've never seen them as important, though I understand that some people enjoy them. But so much that you cannot read without it? (Or at least so much that it makes reading significantly less enjoyable).

To me, that's like someone saying they like eating popcorn while watching movies, and that they could never watch a movie without popcorn. Do you really even enjoy the movies, or just the popcorn?

I also have a vinyl record collection. I really enjoy the ritual of setting a record on the turntable and playing it, studying the packaging and any inserts included while it plays. But 99% of my music listening is done through Spotify or Bandcamp.

eReaders have so many advantages aside from just space. I never lose my place, even when reading 5 books at once. I can highlight what I'm reading without worrying about it being harmful to the book. I can look up a word in a dictionary instantly, on the device (this ended up being a much nicer feature than I thought it would be). Being able to easily read with one hand. My library is entirely backed up online, so if I lose or break my device, I still keep my books (this isn't so true about the collection of books I left at an ex-girlfriend's house).

>I think it boils down to the actual experience

Certainly. It just surprises me how many people seem to enjoy the experience of reading more than the actual reading.

eReaders have so many advantages aside from just space. I never lose my place, even when reading 5 books at once.

That one is really a mixed blessing. I also frequently have several books on the go at once, and have no difficulty in finding my place when I switch between them, even with long intervals. I enjoy a very good memory - but I think this is partly because of having to remember that information prior to the availability of digital text. I never liked using bookmarks and preferred remembering page numbers, and would often recall obscure details or sources by thinking back to where I was when I read them or some information about the book's physical context.

Some people see this as overhead; I see it as exercise that helps me stay mentally fit. It's important to me to be able to maintain a deep mental stack that can operate on conceptual, semantic, and associative levels as well as purely textual ones - searching for text is an extremely one-dimensional affair by comparison.

For me, the experience of reading drastically improves my take aways from the actual reading. I love my kindle, but actual paper books win every time (As long as I'm near my bookshelf). A lot of my time reading, is spent re-reading and eBooks haven't gotten that interface down yet. Sometimes I catch myself having zoned out 2, 3, 4 pages ago and being able to flip back and skim through to pick back up at the last part that I was fully cognizant of.

Sometimes I reach a point in the story that suddenly makes something that I read in chapter 3 or 4 much more important, it's way easier to leave one finger where I am and flip back to that pivotal moment (especially helpful if I had put the book down for a few weeks before picking it back up again).

Sometimes I'm having a conversation with my fiance later in the day or the week and something that I had read was really relevant to the conversation even if I didn't think that it was important enough at the time to highlight it. If I had read it in a physical book, I have an idea where it was physically and can usually find it in a couple of seconds by flipping through the pages. If I had read it on my kindle, then I just have to do a mediocre job of paraphrasing a beautiful turn of phrase.

In my unstudied and ill-informed opinion, computers and the internet have trained many of us to view intellectual content as more abstracted from the physical experience of ingesting it than it really is, as though the ideal of reading would actually be telepathy from writer to reader, and anything added to that signal chain must be by definition noise. I don't know if I totally buy that view though. I sympathize with the students who focus better with print; I do too - and I take better notes when I write by hand. I don't think that's because I'm anachronistic; I think it's because of some fundamental aspect of being both a mind and a body.

Exactly. We're more and more going away from analog, physical interactions directly to the symbolic / upper brain. But I deeply believe that the best path to symbolic abstraction is from real to ideal. Skipping the first seems an optimization but it's denying the machine on which the program runs, and is detrimental in the end. Unless you do advanced maths, then your brain is used to go directly to abstract ideas through highly compressed communication forms in signs.

Ha, well, I edited my first comment too much, I said I believe that this is a fundamental trait of humans. We love the physical sensations. Typing on a mechanical keyboard, playing on a weighted-keys piano (instead of responsive synth.), touching paper. It becomes as important as the symbolic experience (the aesthetic pleasure of music, or ideas put in words). Medium and message blend into one.

>Aside from looking at the ink, none of these things actually have to do with reading..

Actually they do, comprehension and memorization are parts of reading. Events (like reading) that engage more senses engage us more deeply and enforce comprehension and memorization.

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