TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Peter Kerry Powers’ Category

By Prof. Peter Kerry Powers, English Dept. Chair, Messiah College

Moderator: This is one man’s opinion. Try BookGlutton yourself—maybe do a comment in Treasure Island?—and share your thoughts! - D.R.

I didn’t review the BookGlutton immediately after trying this community annotations service on Treasure Island.

Probably I was delaying because it’s always easier to review or talk about something that you love or hate. Easier to get exercised and visceral when you want to damn things to perdition, or when you think we’ve arrived at A Moment of World-Historical Revolution. Perhaps unfortunately for Book Glutton, it strikes me as neither world-historical nor revolutionary. It is—in that damnably tepid turn of phrase—"OK." Or as I sometimes say on my students’ papers: "Not Too Bad." No wonder they hate me.

Beyond paper books: Shared readerly wisdom

First, what is BookGlutton? On the one hand, it is just another of many places online sites where one can get full-text versions of literary classics and not-so-classics, though the site also promises to be a publishing venture for contemporary writers.

The books are loaded into a reader in your computer browser. The reader is the approximate size of a typical paperback, and through several nifty features the reader gives human readers a lot of options that aren’t available either through other e-book services and readers or via traditional cardboard-and-paper books. For one thing, I can join an online club reading the book I choose, and we can leave each other notes filled with our readerly wisdom. We can also communicate in real time via a chat window attached right to the reader window itself. Thus I can talk and read at the same time, something my children and my students seem to find unexceptional but which I still find somewhat like patting my head and rubbing my stomach at the same time.

I’ve been on record as having my doubts about e-books, so let me go on record first with what I liked or found interesting about the whole BookGlutton experience.

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By Prof. Peter Kerry Powers, English Dept. Chair, Messiah College

Moderator: Might the Kindle take away money for gourmet dog food? I have no idea what this four-legged guy—not mentioned in Prof. Powers’ post—is thinking. But maybe that’s one possibility. Meanwhile check out Rob Preece’s earlier thought on the topic, as well as the related discussion. - D.R.

I admit I’ve been a little hesitant to buy a Kindle, not out of lack of interest or complete antipathy to e-books. Indeed, I’m kind of intrigued if not totally convinced. But the biggest thing stopping me has been the cost.

Professors aren’t as well off as people tend to think, but on the whole full-time professors—a diminishing breed—are still solidly middle class. My salary as a full professor with about eight years of post-collegiate education and 16 years of full time teaching experience is in the low 70s. And, to be honest, most professors, especially at small schools or third-rank state schools make a lot less than I do. I’m like most professors, pleased with so little compared to their expertise and experience. Give me a book and four or five weeks clear of having to prepare for classes or other administrative work in the summer, and everything seems like gravy.

Hesitant on Kindle

Still, even though I’m better off than many people, I’ve hesitated on the Kindle. 400 bucks is at least an hour or two of my daughter’s prospective college education. Who knows, with interest I may be able to add an hour or two. And it makes me wonder just a bit about the business plan associated with dedicated e-book readers. I would be, I think, a prime candidate for an e-book reader. But on the other hand, I’m an absolutely atypical American when it comes to books purchasing. Most Americans say they buy five books a year and read four. My guess is the other sits on the shelf in order too look kind of impressive even though it’s never read. Reading as many as 12 books a year is considered being a dedicated reader by a lot of folks, and was the benchmark employed by the NEA in some of their recent pronouncements.

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By David Rothman

Prim in a pragmatic way, the TeleBlog draws its share of readers from the K-12 and library communities and won’t run illustrations to accompany this post, except for the little image to the left. Also, you needn’t answer the question in the headline, inspired by Rex Reed’s old interview collection, Do you sleep in the nude?

That said, I can’t resist linking to a witty post by Prof. Peter Powers on Naked book reading: An idea whose time has come. “A book about naturalism in East Germany is being promoted with a naked book reading,” Anova reported in an article to which Prof. Powers points. In fact, the book author, Thomas Kupfermann, “induced devotees to send him their photographs and secured a contribution from East German television reporter Hans-Joachim Woller,” according to the Earth Times.

The p-book angle…

Over at Messiah College—and, yes, I’m glad they’re not prude there—Prof. Powers opines in a p-book context: “Now here’s a stretch, but I have to say that a naturist book club meeting is testimony yet again to the enduring popularity of plain old books. I mean, can you imagine a naturist meeting at your local Internet cafe. What would be the point? Half the people would be surreptitiously surfing pornography anyway.”

…and the inevitable e-book angle…

So, ignoring the comment on Net cafe folks, who surely are all there to read Project Gutenberg editions of David Copperfield, here’s the inevitable e-book angle. Might Jeff Bezos borrow some Sports Illustrated models and photograph them reading off Kindles at a beach for naturalists? One way to introduce the Kindle to Continental Europe? A big negative is that the Kindle and other E Ink readers lack color screens, which would spoil the fun. But E Ink screens would be great viewing on sunny beaches, and, of course, plastic bags could protect the gizmos from the elements. Furthermore, for those insistent on color, LCDs are another option, perhaps for use in the shade under beach umbrellas.

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By Prof. Peter Kerry Powers, English Dept. Chair, Messiah College

“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits,” Albert Einstein said in a quotation I picked up from by jan on freedom.

“Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”

Einstein lived in a different age from ours, that’s for sure. I’m more worried that my students’ lives are so frantic and busy—like mine—that they hardly have time to read and reflect. I have to schedule the time in my calendar. Reading as a task. Indeed, people who manage to find time for reading may be the most industrious among us. Seriously, though, I have a big sense that the so-called reading crisis has less to do with television and the Internet than it does with our frantic American sense of having to get things done.

Or, given the realities of workplace “efficiency”—a code for fewer people doing more work—it’s not just the frantic sense;  it’s the frantic reality of having to get stuff done. Or else. At the end of the day, who has the energy for the work reading requires? Much easier to curl up with American Idol.

Moderator: One advantage of E, of course, as many e-book boosters have noted, is that you can whip out your cellphone or PDA and read in the grocery line or a doctor’s waiting room. So you can carve out time for reading that you might otherwise lack. Granted, you might not be able to do as much justice to your book as you could by focusing on it at your armchair. But that’s better than no reading.

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By Prof. Peter Kerry Powers, English Dept. Chair, Messiah College

Moderator’s note: I mostly agree with Peter Powers, but for a different perspective on a somewhat related topic, read Sam J. Miller’s essay Where the Readers Are, in The Quarterly Conversation. - D.R.

Mark Bauerlein, blogging for the Chronicle of Higher Education, posed some interesting reflections on boys and reading this past week. He was reflecting on the iPulp Fiction Library, which is probably worth a blog in itself. The library, run by a friend of Bauerlein’s, exists to promote reading, especially though not exclusively for boys, by reinvigorating the tradition of the dime novel by providing free online fiction. A few excerpts from Bauerlein’s blog for the Chronicle:

“Five years ago I would have written back with something like, ‘C’mon, can’t we push a little Melville and Swift instead?’ Not anymore. Books of any kind compete with so many digital diversions that just about any fiction that encourages long reading hours is worth a look—pulp or sports or Western or murder mystery or classic novel. Reading researchers believe that sheer volume of reading plays a large role in the acquisition of basic literacy skills and vocabulary, and that print matter of even child-oriented books can be more verbally challenging than some of the best television shows.

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By Prof. Peter Kerry Powers, English Dept. Chair, Messiah College

One thing that always struck me as a bit odd in the Harry Potter movies is the moving illustrations of books and newspapers.  Odd because, set in the present, there’s a sense in which the Internet is already a great deal more magical than that.  As things go, indeed, Harry Potter is a peculiarly a-chronic, living in the modern world as if he’s never seen a computer. Still, those video books are, in some sense, a continuation and enhancement of the tradition of illuminated manuscript—great textual form of the world of Gothic witches and warlocks.

The above video, e-mailed to me, reminded me of this, one of many announcements about writing contests that I get as an English professor.  This one came with a twist since it’s promoting the use of YouTube as a resource and as a media for creative writing.  I checked out the details as much as I could—writing contests are famously cash-cows for journals, requiring entrants to pay anywhere from a 10 to 50 dollar reading fee for what ends up being a one in a thousand chance of being published.  Not a con exactly;  just a grim fact of how literary culture has to support itself in our society.  This looks decently legit, and no fees that I can find.

A control issue

I’m struck by two things I see here.  One is the idea of YouTube as a medium for or at least an enhancement to traditional creative writing.  I’m not much taken by the idea of embedding text in video format—I’ve seen work like this before on the net in multi-media forms of poetry.  Touted as an “interactive” form of reading that values the reader, this kind of thing really ends up wresting a lot of control from the reader by controlling how and when the reader will see the text the reader sees.

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By Prof. Peter Kerry Powers, English Dept. Chair, Messiah College

Prof. Powers is chair of Messiah College’s English Department. We’ll follow him as he befriends—or gives up on?—various forms of book-related technology.

A colleague who is a librarian and shares a lot of my interests in writing and reading sent me the following from a friend’s blog:

“In a previous post my daughter blew me away with her use of eLocker to access her school files from home. Last night my son used MyAccess [link added] to write an essay online. Big whoop—right? Get this—it analyzed and graded it in an instant. Took about 3 seconds tops and he was looking at a score that broke out scoring elements not only in spelling and grammar (Word can do that)—things like content and delivery, organization, completeness of development. It was like having my 5th grade English teacher right there—red pen in hand. It saves all of his essays and projects and graphs out a cumulative progression over time, showing improvements and areas to work on. Incredible.”

The ballyhoo

“With MY Access!®,” the blog quotes the company, “students are motivated to write more and attain higher scores on statewide writing assessments. By using MY Access! in the classroom, teachers can provide students with the practice they need to improve their writing skills. The program’s powerful scoring engine grades students’ essays instantly and provides targeted feedback, freeing teachers from grading thousands of papers by hand and giving them more time to conduct differentiated instruction and curriculum planning.”

I wish I could share the enthusiasm, but I am more than a little skeptical. It may be the science/humanities divide in play, but there is no getting past the fact that a lot of this represents some of the absolutely worst things that are happening with writing in our secondary schools. And we continue to wonder why our kids can’t write and prefer to do anything but read?

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By David Rothman

I’m about to post Peter Kerry Powers’ perspicacious essay “Writing by the numbers: Who needs an audience?” So what is the best way to learn writing? How about reading—of narrative works, not just exposition alone? This is no small part of the rationale behind the TeleRead plan for a well-stocked national digital library system blended in with local schools and libraries.

Yes, formal instruction in writing can help, but it’s no replacement. Below I’ll highlight a just-received comment from a TeleBlog reader named William—titled “How an interest in narrative helped my career”:

“I write sales copy for several multi-million dollar Internet businesses. When I applied for my position I needed to submit a writing sample. To differentiate myself I submitted the first few pages of an unpublished novel I’m finishing up rather than sales copy. It got me in for an interview and I got the job.

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By Prof. Peter Kerry Powers, English Dept. Chair, Messiah College

Prof. Powers is chair of Messiah College’s English Department. We’ll follow him as he befriends—or gives up on?—various forms of book-related technology. His bio is at the end of this post. Welcome, Pete! - D.R.

I still remember my shock and dismay a couple of years ago when I clicked on to the New York Times book page and found an advertisement of much a younger, more handsome and vaguely Mediterranean-looking young man who oozed sex appeal as he looked out at me from the screen with headphones on his ears.

“Why Read?” asked the caption.

Surely this was the demise of Western Civilization as we knew it, to say nothing of being a poor marketing strategy for a newspaper industry increasingly casting about in vain for new readers.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that audiobooks have developed a generally sexy and sophisticated cache for literary types that other shorthand ways to literature typically lack. As an English professor, I’ve been intrigued lately that a number of colleagues around and about have told me they listen to audiobooks to “keep up on their reading.” To some degree I’ve always imagined this as a slightly more sophisticated version of “I never read the book, but I watched the movie,” which has itself been about on a par with reading Sparknotes.

However, as I mentioned in a post in my Read, Write, Now blog, another colleague recently took issue with my general despairing sense that the reading of literature, at least, is on the decline, no matter the degree to which students may be now reading interactively on the web. “Yes,” she said, “but what about audiobooks?” She went on to cite the growth in sales over the past few years as evidence that interest in literature may not be waning after all.

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