« "Backlash fun with Facebook" | Main | Talk nerdy to me »
September 08, 2006
Books in Bed
Agenda Item: Do you think you can get the same satisfaction and speed reading a whole book online or in actual text?
“Some of the features of paper are well known: Reading more than three pages of text on a screen makes your eyes bleed, but I can read paper for hours. You can underline, highlight, and annotate paper in a way that is still impossible with Web pages.” (Golub)
This sums up my feelings well because I love books, even the smell of musty garage sale classics because you can physically mark them in seconds without having to log on, find a website, etc. I also like not having to share every thought with a large group because some days I’m just singing a song stuck in my head or thinking about how much I want a burger and scribble so in the margins. I don’t have to edit it so a bunch of people I don’t know can clearly understand my real points. Plus, if you write something out and you’re presenting it, it’s easier to just ad-lib. That’s what I’ve always done. I’ve learned to read with pen in hand and it’s nice to be able to sit at the pool or under a tree somewhere and not have to worry about getting your expensive laptop wet or forgetting to save something. While I like reading on the Net to save money on the ridiculous amounts of text teachers make us buy (that we only read 2 pages of anyway), I don’t like the fact that I can’t really experience the reading. I am very nostalgic of the feeling I got while listening to my favorite teacher read aloud Judy Blume’s SuperFudge to the class as I watched her turn the pages, bend the book, etc. I guess I just prefer falling asleep with a book than rolling over and having a laptop digging into my ribs or worse, just breaking it as I toss and turn.
Posted by ErinWaite at September 8, 2006 02:27 PM