At last, I got why reading long physical books annoyed me so much, while the same equivalent e-book seem reasonable. It's not the physical presence of a book (the touch, the smell,the weight, the paper cuts and so on), but rather how imposing it is. Put simply, it's difficult to multi-task with books. You might object that physical books don't prevent multi-tasking at all, but I mean something more specific than just reading while doing something else. If that was the case, audio books work quite well. And even then, I feel the same "linear restriction" with audio books as with physical books.
What I mean is reading a chapter, then jumping to another book, or reading stuff on Twitter, or Google Reader, then to a magazine, then back to the next chapter. Physically, that would require a table, or the floor. I clearly remember the annoyance I had until my last year of university when I had to use my entire bed to lay out open a dozen books that I could cross-reference.
With e-books, it's almost too easy to read in parallel multiple books. And while many would complain how reading books on a backlit screen compared to a e-ink screen tires the eyes, at least reading an e-book on a computer can be done next to another window, with a YouTube video or a news web site. It's not like we all have ADD, it's just that our brains cannot entirely focus ideas and attention on a single thing for a long stretch of time, and annoyingly physical books prevent easily switching from one sphere of attention to another.
Published on June 21, 2012 at 21:51 EDT
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