I read an article in the New York Times last week sometime and it’s been kind of bouncing around in my mind ever since. The article was about how the social aspect of e-readers and so on are really changing how we read and what we read. It talks about how one of the features of the Kindle is that you can highlight passages and the “most highlighted” passages come up as underlined in everyone’s text. In this way, you can kind of tell what other people are hooking onto and that really has the potential of changing your reading experience.
It also talks about how the e-readers kind of make us more unfocused and force the reader to multi-task, where a regular book is quite the opposite. One of the lines that I really loved was this: “We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected.”
Pretty interesting stuff. Check it out here: Yes, People Still Read…
2 Comments
Food for thought. I still think that ereading will not take over hardcopy book reading. But, maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. I love that more people are reading, but as you and this article point out, that reading experience is totally altered by the ereading format. Hm.
This is a brand new feature that I just noticed with what I’m reading now on my kindle. It is distracting actually. I like it as a feature but only if I ask for it not to see it already while reading.