Quotation of the day

“[Auntie Jean’s] flat, although still in a state of disarray, actually looked considerably tidier than it had before the forensic team began to search it.”

This is from Freefall, third in the “Tunnels” series of books – aimed at a teenage audience, but a good adult read nevertheless – which I am gradually reading and will review together when I'm done.

Aunie Jean is a deliberately cartoonish character, half slattern and half goodhearted salt of the earth, but the above quoted sentence made me laugh out loud.

This illustrates one of the advantages of eReading, since I allowed myself to be seduced into it: I read mostly on a 120mm tablet (since I only eRead when on the move), never on a PC which is impossibly clunky ... but I can mark a section (like the one above) when I see it, on the spur of the moment, then instantly call it up, copy and paste it, later when (as I am now) at a “proper” keyboard. A researcher's dream.

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• Brian Williams & Roderick Gordon, Freefall. 2009, Frome: Chicken House. 9781906427054 (pbk).
  Also 2012, London: Scholastic, (Kindle edition, location 908-909)
  

The "real" thing - the flip side

It's high time, having talked often enough about my lack of æsthetic pleasure when reading from digital devices, that I redress the balance; and an inner city café conversation has given me the push to do so.

When Matt Revell commented on my "The real thing" post, regarding his change of feelings on this subject he emphasised “the convenience that the Kindle offers”, which I couldn't deny; I have never disputed the convenience of electronic readers, only their æsthetics. However, he also opened with one nuclear deterrent of a point which trumps everything: “I'm reading a lot more” ... and with that I cannot argue. It's the same argument which I've now encountered in a dramatic way.

P is the "alpha" in a group of young women whom I encounter within an education outreach programme: all of them intelligent, all of them educationally disconnected, all of them exploring, suspiciously, ways to escape the trap into which those two facts have led them. I mention her alpha status because it is crucial to my relationship with them. They are all there because P is there; if P lost interest and left, none of them would stay long without her.

P could not be more different from Matt. Whereas he was already a reader with an profound interest in literature, for whom the electronic reader has enabled continuance in a busy life, she is someone whom literacy let down at an early age: she found reading slow and difficult, something to be worked at if the payoff was worthwhile, but not in itself a source of any enjoyment. It's P's story which has, nevertheless, echoed Matt's.

P says that she had never in her life read a book beyond the first chapter or so, never mind all the way through. She would sometimes start one, always when there was nothing else to do, but “couln't be arsed with carrying it around”. The next time she was at a loose end, but only if she happened to be wherever she had left the book, she would pick it up again ... but couldn't remember where she'd gotten to, or what had happened, when she put it down days or even weeks before. After a while she would “get fucked off with it and give up”. Later she would try another, repeat the process, reinforce the negative feelings, give up again.

Christmas 2009, she was given an e-reader. She thought it “a rubbish present” and it sat on a shelf for months, plugged in but unused and ignored.

Then came the day when she was bored, it was raining, none of her friends answered the phone, and in desperation she picked up the reader. It was preloaded with a dozen books; the giver had obviously thought carefully about them, since they included Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga vampire quartet and P had enjoyed the first two films adapted from the first two novels in that sequence.

She started reading Twilight, the first novel but, as usual, put it aside as soon as another diversion offered itself. She forgot it again for a couple of weeks but, when she returned, the device remembered where she had stopped. She moved back one page to recover the thread and then took up where she had left off. After a couple of such returns, she stopped reading to go shopping. Encouraged by the new continuity and by the small size and weight of the reader, instead of putting it down she unplugged it from the wall for the first time and dropped it into her bag. On the bus, she pulled it out again and continued reading until she reached the shops. When she finished Twilight she went on to Eclipse.

To cut a long story short by leaping about a year to the present (you can, I'm sure, construct the intervening steps for yourself), P is now reading “about a book a week or ten days”. She has also investigated some surprising material, including a complete works of Shakespeare which was on her reader alongside Meyer: “Most of Shakespeare is crap”, she assures me, “don't waste your time on it. But a couple of his plays are cool, like The tempest is well wicked f'rinstance, and some of the sonnets are absolutely fucking amazing”.

She has moved beyond fiction, too. She has a number of reference guides related to things that interest her and that, it seems, was what brought her (and thus her group, too) to tentative reengagement with education through the outreach programme.

Lacking my moral squeamishness about copyright, P has recruited an unrequited technophile admirer to supply her new habit with free hacked copies of most titles she wants. But she does buy “about one new book ever six weeks or so, 'cos I can't be arsed with waiting for the crack”, so the writing and publishing industries are still benefitting from her to an extent. I'm turning over in my mind the philosophical relationships between this and public libraries, but haven't formulated any opinions as yet. Her local public library, in fact, plans an ebook loan service shortly, and perhaps that will be a hook to draw her deeper into what the system has to offer her intellect.

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• Stephenie Meyer, Twilight. 2005, New York: Little, Brown, 9780316160179 or 2006, London: Atom. 1904233805 (pbk.). Digital edition 2009, London: Hachette Digital. 1904233651
• Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse. 2007, London: Atom. 9781904233893 (hbk.) and 9781904233909 (pbk.), or more recently 2010, London: Atom. 9781905654635 (pbk.). Digital edition 2009, London: Hachette Digital. 1907410505
  
  

Keep taking the tablets (2)

OK ... continuing from my initial post in this thread ... Question 1 (from Clarissa Vincent, Frank Jones and Zuleika Ferris in particular): what contribution does a tablet, as such, make to my personal ICT ecosystem? This has to be the core of the thing; unless a tablet, in and of itself, does something which I need, it will be dead weight. So; here, in no particular order, are (to keep things short) four of the many praises I could sing:

• I spend a fair amount of time in meetings. I tend to make meeting notes on paper and type them up afterwards, so a keyboard isn't a necessity here. I do, however, use a computer as a reference resource: everything from the agenda to retrieving statistics, reports, collateral information related to whatever is being discussed. A conventional clamshell, even a small netbook, sits between its user and the rest of the table like a barrier; it changes group dynamics. A tablet, lying flat on the table, however, has no such effect. Furthermore, mouse and keyboard have a distracting effect which fingers moving discretely across the surface of a flat tablet avoid.

• I make a lot of use of visual material (maps, charts, plots, photographs), both on my own and in discussion with others. A tablet provides a far more intuitive way to interact with such material – especially when several people are interacting. Just before writing this, I was talking to a dive master, a fishing boat captain and a marine biologist about plans for a sea bed search; all four of us, as we talked, were interactively pinching and zooming and panning a composite satellite image and seabed chart to illustrate our own points or explore and understand each others. you can't do that on a conventional display. The same is true in discussing concepts with groups of students.

• Despite my repeatedly aired æsthetic preference for paper books over digital, I do use e-readers for many practical purposes ... and unlike most people I talk to, I find the quality of reading experience on the tablet far superior to that on an e-ink device. There is also the advantage that I am not tied into any one format or content provider; I have a virtual Kindle, so can buy and Kindle texts, but can equally well move to any other alternative as required. Switching back and forth between books is quick and easy compared to any of the dedicated devices, too. Then there are the same advantages of quick and easy resizing as I mentioned in connection with maps and so on: reading a paper, I can enlarge a diagram to exactly the right size for close examination with a flick of finger and thumb, then return the page to normal reading size just as quickly. I have to admit that weight and size are greater (but I'm carrying it anyway, for the other reasons listed here), and battery life shorter (but still plenty long enough; I'll cover this later, in another section) than in a Kindle or equivalent reader, but find the trade offs more than worthwhile.

• A tablet is a wonderful replacement for a photographic portfolio. I can carry as many sets and sequences of pictures as I like, without any weight penalty beyond the table itself – and the display quality is superb. When my niece asked to see a particular sequence a couple of days ago, in a pub, in the middle of a meal, it was no problem to do so. When an editor who asked for one set suddenly shows an interest in another, I have them to hand.

I read that 97.63% of statistics are invented...

I have just re-read Larry's Party. I don't know how long it took me to read on my first or second times, but I do know that it was on each occasion longer than is usual for me. This time, though, I can pin it down fairly precisely. I picked it up to track down a quotation which I wanted to use in a comment to an Unreal Nature post on the 9th of July, and immediately went on to read it through ... so, fifteen days then.

Why so long, when I would normally expect to finish a book of its length within the day? Because the book is structurally episodic, presented as discrete components drawn from (almost) each of twenty years in the protagonist's internal life. Each component is written in a way which makes it perfectly viable as a separate short story, though it is intended as part of a single narrative. I felt, this time through as on each of the others, compelled to put the book down, to stop, think, digest, after each component.

It's a remarkable book. Highly recommended.

Fifteen days ... at that rate, if it were replicated in serial reading habits (it isn't, in fact, since I read other books through the "pauses for thought" in Larry), would equate to 24.3 books a year. I'm prompted to that meaningless piece of calculation by a statistic in the final section of Larry's Party: that, apparently, an average man (perhaps Canadian; perhaps universally; perhaps in the developed industrial world; it doesn't say) reads 4.3 books a year ... so my Larry rate, taken alone, would put me an exact twenty above some kind of average. That exact twenty was what piqued my curiosity.

There are, of course, a lot of variables. Thick books or thin ones? Fiction or nonfiction? One participant in a discussion thread on Amazon.co.uk (where totals vary from five to two hundred) points out that page count is probably a more reliable measure than book count. Matthew Revell reminded me, during a recent email conversation about eReaders, that those devices change the situation: he is reading far more now that he has a Kindle than he did before, simply because it has become easier to have a book with him always.

Seeking the origin of the 4.3 figure, I asked Wolfram|Alpha for average books read per year. Unfortunately, Alpha is not good at this sort of thing ... it defined "per year" for me instead, as a unit. However, there are other sources of information.

UNESCO monitors number of books published, by country, but that's not the same thing.

According to an Ipsos poll for AP, in 2007 the average USAmerican read more than this 4.3 figure. The estimated mean is given as 20.4, while the median (probably the measure intended by Larry's 4.3) is 6.5. More meaningful, perhaps, are the modal group of four or five, a clear modal bulge (48%) reading between three and ten, and an interquartile range (that is, the "middle half" of the population) falling between four and about eighteen books per year.

In the same year (2007) an online straw poll by The Student Room showed a mean of more than thirty two (projection of the data curve suggests that it may actually be around fifty) and a median in the upper twenties. This is a British forum, but never mind ... gives us the unsurprising suggestion that students read more than the average citizen (though the 5.6% who claimed not to read at all is worrying in a student poll!) A similar straw poll on Yahoo answers, a month ago, gave answers (ranging from 0-120) with a median somewhere around ten or twelve.

Britain's Michael Gove, has expressed the opinion that a school student should read fifty books per year. I am not a fan of this sort of "should" target, myself, an cannot see how it could possibly be enforced, although I confess I would like to see the number rise of its own accord.

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• Carol Shields, Larry’s party, 1997, London: Fourth Estate. 1857027051

The “real” thing...

I have always had a strong æsthetic preference for physical rather than purely electronic media in my acquisition of information content. Practical considerations often outweigh that preference when the content is utilitarian; but they never eclipse it.

I've mentioned this before, in relation to text. If I am seeking facts, or must carry a lot of content at the same time, then one or another electronic reader makes more sense than paper and ink. The reader can give me a thousand documents, or more, for the same weight and bulk as one. But when it comes to reading for pleasure, I would rather carry the bulk of a novel in paperback than the weightless downloaded version. I value the electronic reader¹ (though I'm in the process of ditching it in favour of software on a tablet computer; more of which another time), but I can't love it.

So it is, too, with music. Except, of course, that I have no utilitarian reasons for choosing downloaded music over physically purchased media beyond cost and availability.

Matt Revell commented to my previous post that “The beauty of a book is, I believe, that I just need a little light and my specs to enjoy it. It's not like listening to music, where you do need some kind of equipment whether you're listening to an Ogg file or a vinyl record.” A good point, and one which reverses to the case that if one is listening to music on the move², it makes little difference how one came by it. I never have a need to consult Stockhausen's Helikopter-Streichquartett or Craig Davis playing Sister Sadie in the middle of a meeting, the way I might have to consult legislation or published papers ... but, if I did, I could do so just as effectively from digital copies of purchased CDs (or even shellac 78s, for that matter) as from digital downloads.

Some music is no longer available on physical media. Some new music never was. In either case, I am quite happy to download it as my primary means of procurement and store it not only on my hard disk and back it up on the cloud but also save it onto a CD of my own. Much music, however, is still (so far; it may well not always be so) available for physical purchase – and I prefer to buy it that way if I possibly can.

There are the obvious advantages and disadvantages. Electronic copies are usually at a quality level compromise which is good enough and small enough for a particular purpose, and if I have the original physical medium I can go back for a better conversion at any time (see note 2 below). On the other hand, two and a half thousand albums fit as neatly in my shirt pocket as one, on a hard disk, but represent an increasingly demanding storage problem in physical form.

None of that, however, whilst true, really has much to do with my real reasons for preferring physical ownership. When it comes right down to it, my real reasons are æsthetic. I love the complete artefact which an album (or book) represents, and that is the true basis for my preferences.

There is a process of fragmentation in cultural forms, at the moment, which for the first time seems capable of excising those forms from our cultural stock. I don't suggest that there is anything wrong with fragmentation, and certainly there is nothing new about it. From my earliest reading memories, I have returned to favourite passages in a novel without reading the whole; from my first LP purchase as a teenager, I often put a disk on the turntable to play just one favourite track from an album or one favourite passage from a long work. But there is now a broad tendency to only hear the fragment, rather than choosing it from the whole. Downloading did not start this ... radio stations which play tracks from albums, arias from operas, extracts from concertos, predate downloads by a long way ... now the process has moved to the point where it is legitimate to wonder whether production of long, structurally coherent cultural forms such as the novel and its musical equivalents might not face a future redundancy.

In music, the continued existence of the long form is often (not always) tied up with the physically æsthetic object. I bought The defamation of Strickland Banks, which is an exception: while I get real pleasure from the sleeve note booklet in general, and from two of the black and white photographs in general, this is a brave attempt to carry the concept album into the new nonphysical era. Defamation relies on its narrative continuity, and planned video form, to bind itself together as a single long entity.

At the other end of the scale from Defamation, I have recently been given Emily Barker's Almanac and Kate Bush's Director's cut, both of which, in different ways, play on my desire for a physical æsthetic.

Almanac, like several other albums in its genre (Joanna Newsom's Milk eyed mender, for instance), dispenses with the usual jewel CD case in favour of a fold out cardboard one. There's a thumbnail picture of it on the left; click it for a large view showing inside and outside, including slotted disk sleeve.

This sleeve, as I hold it, triggers in me all the responses which I usually feel towards a craft object ... including books, particularly hand made books. I am aware that I am being manipulated to respond in this way; but both art and crafts are, always, manipulating our responses. I'm so glad that I don't have a download version, even though I have stored the music itself on a music player from which I listen to it without any need to go into the sleeve.

Director's cut also abandons the jewel case, but instead of a handicrafts approach it takes the form of a hardback book of the same size – with the disk itself sleeved inside the front cover. The book contains the song lyrics, but also a set of intriguing, humorously linked, photographs reminiscent of Penny Slinger meets Duane Michals (for example, the one shown on right, linked to the song lyrics for "And so is love"; again, click the image for a larger view). Many of these images depict people wearing fish heads³.

Both of these I handle with tactile and visual delight which synergises with my enjoyment of the music to produce an æsthetic whole which is so much more than the sum of its parts. The download version of Director's cut includes, in PDF form, a copy of the booklet ... but that really wouldn't (excuse the pun) cut it, for me; I would value it highly, if that were all that was available, but I value the inclusion of the "real" thing, the physical, touchable thing, so very much more.

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1. I say "electronic reader" rather than "Kindle" because the Kindle, being tied to one supplier, is both barely useful to me and philosophically less open than most of its competitors.
2. Listening to music at home, in high fidelity, may be a different matter. By way of experiment, I downloaded and bought copies of the same Bach choral recording from the same supplier. Played through good speakers, the difference was palpable: the download lacked depth and dynamic range compared to the CD.
3. Clearly a reference to the Fish Heads label on which Bush's holding companypublishes her music. This sort of play is not isolated. The holding company itself is "Noble and Brite"; Bush's son, around which much of her life and one explicit song title revolve, is "Bertie", short for "Albert"; and the name Albert means "bright, famous, noble..."

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• Plan B (aka Ben Drew), The defamation of Strickland Banks. 2010, New York: Atlantic Records (679 Artists).
• Emily Barker and The Red Clay Halo, Almanac. 2011, London UK: Everyone Sang.
• Kate Bush, Director's cut. 2011, London UK: Noble & Brite (Fish people).
• Joanna Newsom, The Milk Eyed Mender. 2004 Chicago: Drag City. DC263CD.