I just read my first book all the way through on my iPad and had several thoughts about the experience that relate to reading in general and kids in particular:
Reading is a relationship between the person you are and the one you want to be or become. It is a fundamentally personal transaction almost regardless of what you are reading.
It is disorienting to read a book (on an electronic device) that measures your progress in percentages instead of pages. I would read (Ian Frazier's On the Rez for my men's book group) for an hour and find that I still had 83% left to go. For some reason, I found this quite discouraging, as if I was not making enough progress; it made me restless. Or I would read for a while and then, as I usually do, flip ahead to see where the chapter ends. I usually do this and then think: Okay, I'll read five more pages to finish the chapter. Somehow this was not as useful a guide on the eBook.
Those of us over say, 45, focus on the device which we may or may not experience as a wall between ourselves and the text; those who have grown up on electronic devices--cell phones, computer screens, game screens--will not make this distinction at all. They experience video games as legitimate, real, authentic, visceral experiences; the only computer game I have ever played is Pong, circa 1974. I'm fine with that.
Within five years kids will get durable digital readers that will contain all their school books, including novels. This will solve problems of storage and distribution (of books) at schools. This will save money (replacements of worn out copies of Catcher in the Rye). This will save time: they will get the year's books on the reader in August and never have to take time from class to go to the book room and check out a card. This will help in important ways with reading: kids will be able to click on words to define them at the point of contact; they will be able to annotate texts and search in ways we wish they could but now cannot since they cannot write on the pages; they will, if they have reading difficulties, be able to press a button and have the book read itself to them in what, by then, will sound like a real and pleasant human voice such as we have on GPS devices in our cars now.
How will this happen? Within five years, sales reps from the major publishers will walk into schools with one of these durable digital readers and put it in the hands of the evaluators and say, You will get one of these for free for each student if you purchase all your books with us.
First publisher there wins. Why? Because they will not be selling books but the intellectual software on which the classes run. Just as an business chooses Microsoft Office for its software never thinks again about which suite to buy, but only buys subsequent upgrades and new add-ons, so, too, will the school stay with that one lucky company's suite of texts, delivered through the air via wireless systems as one now uses on a Kindle. Want to add a new novel for the coming year? No problem!
Oh, and my book group, eight men from a range of fields and ages, me the youngest by a few years: how did they read this book? 1: iPhone; 1: Kindle; 2 iPad; 1 audio (on his iPod); 2: the paperback; 1: hardcover from the library.
