reading scholarly work on computer screens

Robert Jackson makes an understandable point about open acces PDF’s:

“So The Speculative Turn is now readable online as a PDF on re.press’s website. I cannot fault the logistical reasons why Open Access PDF’s are gaining popularity, so they should. I could never understand anyone who would wish to anti-democratise academic publication by making work expensive, hard to read or password-segregated. But heres the thing – I cannot abide reading scholarly work on a computer screen.”

Jackson might find it a bit easier if he had an iPad, but the point still holds. Reading scholarly work on screens is still a bit of a pain, and I sometimes find it hard even to read long and technical blog posts. That’s just not the mindset I’m in when using that medium.

My own attitude to the electronicization of books seems like a fairly obvious position, though almost no one seems to formulate in the way I do whenever conversations about the topic arise.

Namely, I do think paper books are doomed. I just don’t think they’re dead yet. There are still many cases in which it is a complete pain to do our reading in techified form. The iPad is still a little bit too heavy. Marking texts is still not as easy as it could be. It still doesn’t feel quite right to be using the electronic books.

But I’ve been stunned by the number of people even in supposedly avant garde philosophical circles (such as speculative realism), who claim to be iconoclastic destroyers of everything else, who are nonetheless bizarrely sentimental about paper books.

The point seems obvious to me. Paper books are extremely inefficient. Who wants to cut down whole forests needlessly? Who wants their mobility sapped and their living space cluttered with books that could in principle all fit on a couple of thumb drives?

The only reason I’m keeping up with the whole sham of owning thousands of kilos of books is for the reasons Robert Jackson gives in his post. But I’ve never been sure why people don’t think the technical problem is soluble. Surely it is.

Back in the 1990’s, the argument against electronic books was basically along these lines: “But you’ll never be able to curl up on the couch with a good computer.” The objection was already completely banal at the time, but it still lingers with us today.

Someone’s going to solve this technical problem, most likely in the next 10 years and certainly in the next 20, and just as the Walkman and the personal computer and the compact disc and other such devices became normal parts of the everyday life landscape, some Sony or Apple is going to nail the electronic book with a killer device that sends us all rushing to dump our paper books. Expect a cheap, accurate home scanner to appear along with it. We can all scan all of our books in as a big household project and then we will all dump our paper books in recycling bins, except for a few treasured first editions and gifts from special people.

I’d put the over/under on this becoming the norm at around the year 2017. I fully expect to enter retirement owning less than 20 paper books.