Ebooks are varying the way we read, and the way journalist’s write

If you hand me the first paperback edition of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow I can, quickly and without an excessive amount of scrabbling, find you the page where the hero loses the girl. My disappointment on his behalf has lingered physically thereon page for the past 20 years. Likewise, in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, there's an extended section where a platoon of the Red Army defends “House 6/1”, establishing a short lived zone of political freedom there. For me, this freedom seems to measure therein chunk of pages. If I check out the book end-on, I can see, roughly, where House 6/1 exists.

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Yet with the approaching of eBooks, the planet of the physical book, read numerous times that your imagination can “inhabit” individual pages, is dying. I’m not the sole person in my circle who has stopped buying new books in anything aside from digital form, and even the cherished books described above are now re-read, once I got to, on Kindle.

But what's the eBook doing to the way we read? And the way, in turn, are the changes within the way many us read getting to affect the way novelists write? This is often not just an issue for academics; you simply need to check out people on a beach this summer to ascertain how influential fiction remains, and how, if its narratives were to vary radically, our self-conception may additionally change. Where the impact are often measured, it consists primarily of a propensity to summarize. We read webpages in an “F” pattern: the highest line, scroll down a touch, have another read, scroll down. Academics have reacted to the increased volume of digitally published papers by skim-reading them. 

The attention span has shortened not simply because eBooks contains endless, searchable digital text, but because they're being read on devices we use for other things. Baron reports that an outsized percentage of children read eBooks on their cellphones – dipping into them within the coffee queue or on conveyance, on the other hand checking their work email or their online sexual love, a thumbs wipe off.

In turn, in thus far as form and business models has reacted to such behavior, fiction has become shorter. Every major publisher has experimented with short stories, serialized fiction, anthologies and mid-range “e-only” books. Against this, experiments with fictional forms that only work for eBooks and hypertext have did not make the large time.

The American novelist Joanna Scott last month bemoaned the tendency, even in award-winning serious fiction, to supply a “good read” with a gripping plot and unfussy writing, “instead of a piece of art”.

I think such complaints are missing the purpose. The addition of an “information layer” to lifestyle is transforming the way we react to stories: both for the creators and therefore the mass audience.

Our lives are already impossible without summarization. Even as the primary encyclopedias were written in response to the matter of too many books, so we, too, have evolved new, instant reference tools.

Any word in an eBook can invoke its own definition, just by selecting it. If a passage in an eBook strikes you as cogent, beautiful or profound you'll bet – once you’ve switched the highlight-sharing function on – many people have already highlighted it. It’s a brief hop from realizing that to paying special attention to the highlighted bits – not out of laziness but as a wise learning strategy.

And while the tutorial study guides to major novels are usually worthless, the Wikipedia pages dedicated to them are often invaluable. That’s because study guides are often the work of one, low-paid hack and therefore the Wikipedia page contains the real-time wisdom of crowds: often wrong, but rarely worthless.

What I feel the literary academics are worried about is that the loss of immersiveness. If I list the books I might save from a burning house – or an exploding Kindle – all of them create worlds during which one can become immersed: Pynchon, Grossmann, Marquez, Durrell within the Alexandria Quartet, and Peter Carey in almost everything.

But a completely unique like Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winning The Goldfinch, subtly derided by the literary world for its readability, isn't the merchandise of the Kindle – but of a replacement relationship between writer and reader.

Pre-digital people had one “self” and that they hauled its sorry ass through the pages of the literary canon within the hope that it might begin better. Digital people have multiple selves, then what they're doing with an immersive story is more provisional and temporary.

So writers are having to try to various things. But what?

It’s probably timely to generalize but my guess is, if you scooped up every book – digital and analogue – being read on a typical Mediterranean beach, and cut out absolutely the crap, you’d be left with three sorts of writing: first, “literary” novels with clearer plots then their 20th century predecessors, less complex prose, fewer experiments with fragmented perception; second, popular novels with a high degree of writerly craft (making the sides of the primary two categories hard to define); third, literary writing about reality – the confessional autobiography, the diary of a journalist, highly embroidered reportage a few legendary event.