Ebooks and the senses
21 April 2009
Kottke hits the nail on the head when it comes to issues with our current and future ereader regime. I might add that we underestimate the cognitive and learning benefits of a tactile reading interface (i.e. books). The olfactory and tactile benefits of a book are also not just a case of sentimentality or emotion but are of considerable pragmatic value.1
Smell works extraordinary well at improving recall and memory of emotional details and can even improve recall of declarative memory in some contexts.2
The hype around the iPhone has in no small way been around the enormous benefits of its rudimentary touch interface; crude by the standards of the history of objects and tools, revolutionary by computing standards.
The book offers an integrated, multisensory, easy to use learning experience. Ebooks of some kind might be the future of publishing, but they will need to up their game considerably if they are offer benefits that match that of the interface they are ostensibly replacing.
I think that ebooks will take over the publishing industry due to their economic benefits That said, there will be demand for certain books in print format because the benefits to the reading experience are unmatched. The book’s value as a memento comes at a distant, but still important, second place.
For example, I just read Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” on my Sony PRS-505 and went out yesterday, as soon as I finished it, and bought it in printed form.
Once ebooks have taken over as the primary format for publishing, the single most consistent and reliable predictor of the quality of a book that a book consumer can rely on, will be whether there is evidence of a demand for it in print from readers of its ebook version.3
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Besides, the dismissal of something as ‘sentimental’ or ‘emotional’ is idiotic to begin with. Our emotions are, by definition, indicators of the things we most care about. This makes them important in a way that should be obvious to anybody who has ever lived, loved and lost. ↩
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Incidentally, this is often called the Proust effect, because Marcel Proust wrote about this exact effect, so eloquently, a century ago. ↩
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In other words: Ebooks will perform the valuable service of keeping rubbish books out of print. ↩
