Court Merrigan’s take on p-books vs. vs. audiobooks vs. Kindles vs. iPhones
Editor’s note: A list of earlier posts on the topic appears at the end. Court is TeleRead’s book reviewer. – D.R.
Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, academic, entrepreneur, and author Ann Kirschner asks, “Do I love books or do I love reading?”—in light of the ever-expanding publishing universe.
For me and probably most readers, it’s an easy question to answer: reading. I don’t much care how my reading comes as long as it’s written well. Kirschner wasn’t sure. So she decided to conduct an experiment, reading Dickens’ masterwork Little Dorrit four ways: paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and iPhone.
“Little Dorrit was an accidental choice, but I could hardly have done better. Its length, multiple story lines, 19th-century allusions, and teeming cast of characters helped me to test the functionality of different formats. Beyond the artifice of my reading experiment, though, please don’t think that technology compromised my ability to appreciate this beloved novel, written in 1857 at the height of Dickens’s power and popularity. Just the opposite.”
She starts with the requisite warmed-over nostalgia for paperbacks: “How dare we think that anything could replace it? Impossible to imagine that any of these newfangled devices could last nearly 40 years. The perfume of old paper filled the air.” I would have clicked onwards had she gone no further. But instead she ventured on to audiobooks.
Audiobooks are wonderful in all the situations she describes, walking, driving, sitting in the dentist’s chair. But I can’t imagine how many hours this 1000-page plus books would consume listened to in its entirety. And audiobooks practically require you multitask. The painfully slow pace of spoken stories becomes apparent if you’re not, say, cooking; you don’t pull up an easy chair next to the fireplace and curl up with your MP3 player.
Doesn’t mince words
Which leaves the Kindle and iPhone. Kirschner doesn’t mince words:
“I’ve been dreading this, but let me get my prediction out now: The iPhone is a Kindle killer. I abandoned the Kindle edition of Little Dorrit almost as soon as I read one chapter on my iPhone. Kindle, shmindle. It does almost nothing that an iPhone can’t do better — and most important, the iPhone is always with me. Woody Allen had it right: Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.”
Now I don’t have an iPhone, so I can’t really comment. But insofar as she goes, I imagine she’s right. However. I think of the easy chair in the fireplace’s vicinity. At the risk of reveal a Luddite streak, I just can’t see curling up with a … glowing phone.
Why I prefer the Kindle over the iPhone for curling up with a book
Whereas I happily sink into reading oblivion via my Kindle at every opportunity. However, I bet if I actually had an i-something, I probably could do the same. And as Kirschner points out:
“Middle-aged readers think that the dimension of the screen is critical. It’s not: The members of the generation that grew up playing Game Boys and telling time on their cellphones will have absolutely no problem reading from a small screen. Let us pray that they will. Right now, they aren’t buying Kindles — and they aren’t reading books.”
I don’t worry about this. I think there will be plenty of readers in the future. Just not ones very much like the ones we’ve got today. They won’t feel any compunction about curling up with their i-device anywhere. Which is great. It’s the words, the style, the story that matters. Not the format it appears in. Which is a point Kirschner offers a sly insight on: “My personal theory is that Amazon cares less about our choice of screen than our choice of store. Amazon wants Kindle to be a verb, not a noun, as in "I Kindled that book," which could mean that I read it on a smartphone, computer, or dedicated electronic-book device.”
English Language will survive
I suspect she’s right. Which would be perfectly fine with me. The English language seems to be surviving the Facebook-enabled verbing of “friend”, so I bet it could take a “Kindling”. As long as Dickensian journeys keep on starting with "Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun. …", I don’t think it much matters how they get there.
Related: Paul Biba’s pickup of a passage from the Chronicle of Higher Education and ‘Little Dorrit’ enjoyed via the Kindle and oherwise: ‘On the Media’ follows up with Ann Kirschner (my post). Also see Court’s reflection’s on Little Dorrit as a book. You can download Little Dorrit for free from Feedbooks.
June 22nd, 2009 at 10:06 am
Court Merrigan said “But I can’t imagine how many hours this 1000-page plus books would consume listened to in its entirety.”
“Little Dorrit” is available as an unabridged audiobook download at Audible where the listening time is described as 35 hours and 9 minutes.
It is possible to imagine a preposterous person who can listen to “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke for 32 hours and 2 minutes. It is even conceivable that some audio-addled individual might listen to the Mars Trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson for more than 82 hours. This morning while shaving I think I glimpsed the phantasmagorical creature in the mirror.
June 22nd, 2009 at 10:52 am
Yikes, let’s be a little more open-minded. I listened to several of the unabridged Harry Potter books as marvelously performed by Jim Dale. Is there some reason in the age of MP3 files and iPods that you can’t take an audio book to the gym or listen in your car or the subway on your way to work? I actually listened to a huge portion of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on a 16-hour plane trip to Japan.
As to iPhone versus Kindle, I don’t think it’s close for many of us in middle age. The Kindle is easier to grip and better facilitates losing yourself in a book. If you use larger-than-average fonts on the iPhone you end up spending a lot of time turning pages.
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:29 am
Speaking of open-minded, Aaron: As an almost-50-year-old, I have absolutely no problem reading e-books on my PDA, and have no need or interest in purchasing a larger reader like a Kindle. A PDA is no problem to grip, and its screen and fonts can be adjusted to suit. Not all “middle-agers” need big form factors, any more than all youngsters prefer small ones.
You get used to what you want to get used to.
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I have both an iPhone and a Kindle and enjoy reading on both. I mainly use the iPhone Kindle app for short stories. I do not think I’d enjoy reading a long novel on the iPhone. Oh, and I am of the Game Boy generation, and I am definitely reading books!
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:19 pm
I rarely have two hours to give to an audiobook much less 32 hours, but you can now find a lot of audio (MP3) short stories online and they’re perfect for the dentist’s chair, running errands, or waiting for an oil change. At Sniplits (http://www.sniplits.com)we offer stories in most genres and they are professionally narrated and produced for a high quality listening experience.
June 22nd, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Garson and Aaron, Indeed, as I said, audiobooks are wonderful while, say, shaving, or otherwise multitasking. When I was doing a horrible lot of commuting a while back, I listened to several dozen of the beasts. It was gratifying to finish each one, and mortifying to think how much time was spent commuting.
Steve, I agree that you get used to what you get used to. One of these days I’m going to get a hold of an iPhone or an iPod Touch and then my Kindle might just end up gathering dust. Hopefully, though, I’ll use the both of them in tandem.
Jill, I think the news of the Death of Reading thanks to the Gameboy generation is greatly exaggerated, as you amply prove.
Anne, Thanks for the link. Don’t do much audiobooking any more, and when I do, I’ve been a Librivox fan up to this point, but I’ll give your site a look.