QUILLBLOG

The joys of iPhone reading

Over at the U.S. site The Morning News they’re in the middle of their annual “Tournament of Books,” in which various authors, critics, and litbloggers winnow down a list of notable 2008 novels down to one eventual winner. (No Canadian-authored books made the pool this year.) Two writers, Kevin Guilfoyle and John Warner, are providing “colour commentary” on the judges’ decisions, and in a recent entry, things get interesting. (Well, things were already interesting, but they get interesting from a business-of-books perspective.)

Warner veers away from discussing the two novels at hand and into a cri de coeur that the digital future of reading is coming and bookstores had better be ready. One major plank of his argument is that for him, reading a book on a handheld device (he switched back and forth between Kindle and iPhone), was not just an acceptable facsimile of reading a hard copy, but was actually an improvement.

Rather than being a liability, the small screen is an asset because it makes it almost impossible to skim since there’s not enough text on the screen to bother skimming. If I lose focus while I’m reading a physical book, I often find myself skipping down the page, looking for a fresh point of purchase into the text. With the iPod, it was remarkably easy to stay absorbed in the text.