And I’m not talking about paper versus digital. I’m talking about curling up with a good book, for hours. Sitting in a hammock, or in a chair by the fire, just totally pulled into a book. Is the long, totally focused book-reading session a thing of the past — and does this mean we’re getting less immersed in our stories?
Top image: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
We’ve never had more distractions keeping us from focusing totally on a book as we have today — in fact, sometimes it feels like half the non-fiction books published in a given week are bemoaning how distracted and overwhelmed with input we all are nowadays. But there are also plenty of signs that the way we’re reading books is changing. Not because of e-books, per se — e-book readersdo a good job of replicating the experience of reading a book on paper — but because our lives and relationships with technology are changing.
Just this past weekend, every gadget and design blog was obsessed with a new app called Spritz, which lets you read way faster. (On Friday, all the articles were saying it would let you read500 words per minute, but by today that was up to 1,000 words per minute.) Spritz works by giving you one word at a time, in a 13-character space, and carefully positions the words so that you never have to move your eyes at all. The notion is that eye-movement is a wasted activity that slows down your reading speed, and you ought to be able to read War and Peace in short order.
People have been warning about the death of reading for
decades — just check out this
1991 Los Angeles Times article that blames television and videogames for driving people away from books. In 2007, a
study found half of young people weren’t reading for pleasure any more.
But if anything, the past half-dozen years has seen an encouraging trend in terms of people reading books for pleasure. E-book readers have become more popular and widespread, and suddenly everybody was buying more books again. Especially among younger people, the ability to read a novel on your phone has meant a boom in book-buying and reading.
But how are people’s reading habits changing? Now that we read on
e-readers and phones, do we tend to read a few minutes at a time, instead of
sitting in a chair for an hour or two? Also, as everybody works harder and also spends more time using the
internet, is book-reading becoming just another “app” that we shuffle through, between Flappy Bird and Google Hangout?
Is this changing the way we think about books? And more importantly, do we tend to get
less immersed in books as a result?
Let’s examine these questions one by one, looking at the evidence that’s out there.
Are people spending
less time reading?
Now that books have to compete with everything else on your phone or tablet, are people spending less time total reading them? There certainly seems to be some evidence to back that up — along with some evidence that e-readers are actually reversing this trend.
A 2012
poll of British smartphone users found that 26 percent of them were
spending less time reading books, now that they could browse the internet on
their phones. Similarly, a
recent Yomiuri Shimbun poll in Japan also found that the more people use
smartphones, the less they read books.
And a 2013
HuffingtonPost poll found that 41 percent of respondents had not read a
fiction book in the past year, while 28 percent had not read a book at all. But
bear in mind all of those polls are based on self-reported data, from a
self-selected group of respondents.
But a
recent Pew Internet survey found that the average ebook reader has read 24
books in the past year, compared with 15 books for non-ebook readers. And 21
percent of Americans had read an ebook in the previous 12 months, up from 17
percent a year earlier.
Here’s a cool infographic showing hours per week spent reading around
the world, via Russia
Beyond the Headlines:
Is the amount of time
per reading session going down?
It certainly seems, based on anecdotal evidence, as though people read for shorter amounts of time per session than they used to. Instead of sitting in an easy chair and reading, most people seem to read on the bus, or on the toilet, or whatever. This is partly our more hectic lifestyles, but also the convenience of pulling up a book on your phone or e-reader.
The Wall Street Journal reported
on a 2010 study that found Kindle owners were buying 3.3 times as many
books as they had before owning the device — which is an amazing increase — and then adds this detail from the survey:
But because e-book gadgets are portable, people report they’re reading more and
at times when a book isn’t normally an option: on a smartphone in the doctor’s
waiting room; through a Ziploc-bag-clad Kindle in a hot tub, or on a treadmill
with a Sony Reader’s fonts set to jumbo. Among commuters, e-readers are
starting to catch up with BlackBerrys as the preferred companions on trains and
buses.
But that’s not all — German
firm Readmill did a study in the U.S. and Germany, and found people are
actually reading books more often on smartphones than on dedicated e-book readers. And that’s even more conducive to snatching a moment with a book here and there.
According to Readmill’s research, people spend more time reading per book on their phones,
and they tend to finish more books if they read them on their phones than on tablets. Most
significantly, check out the bar for “use frequency” in the chart
below — people pull up books much more often on phones than on e-readers,
which suggests lots of brief reading sessions throughout the day.
Meanwhile, the same 2007 study that claimed half of young people never
read for pleasure any more (which predates the ebook boom in earnest) also
found that young people are spending around 10 minutes per day reading books:
And that young people are more likely to read books while
also watching TV, looking at websites or instant messaging:
Also, one
study found that people read a story by Ernest Hemingway 6.2 percent slower
on the iPad and 10.7 percent slower on a Kindle than on the printed page —
possibly due to lower text resolution on those devices. (Obviously, this won’t be a problem, if people start using Spritz.)
Does it make any difference if people use audiobooks instead
of text?
According to a
recent Wall Street Journal article, the audiobook business — which seemed
a relic of a bygone era at one point — has boomed in recent years, reaching
$1.2 billion in sales as compared to $480 million in 1997. Sales of downloaded
audiobooks grew nearly 30 percent in 2011 alone.
But does listening to a story on an audiobook — especially
while you drive or do chores — reduce your appreciation for the storytelling?
There’s some debate about that, according to the
Wall Street Journal article:
The rapid rise of audio books has prompted some hand-
wringing about how we consume literature. Print purists doubt that listening to
a book while multitasking delivers the same experience as sitting down and
silently reading. Scientific studies have repeatedly shown that for competent
readers, there is virtually no difference between listening to a story and
reading it. The format has little bearing on a reader’s ability to understand
and remember a text. Some scholars argue that listening to a text might even
improve understanding, especially for difficult works like Shakespeare, where a
narrator’s interpretation of the text can help convey the meaning.
Less is known about how well people absorb stories when they
are also driving or lifting weights or chopping vegetables. Commuters still
account for half of audio book buyers, according to a report from the research
firm Bowker, which tracks the book business…
Some writers worry that the practice of silent reading could
be threatened, as impatient and busy readers no longer take time to concentrate
on a text.
“If we come to think reading is this secondary activity
we do while doing other stuff, then we lose that deepest and most important
kind of reading,” said Nicholas Carr, author of ‘The Shallows: What the
Internet is Doing to Our Brains.’ “The broader danger is that technology
will give us the illusion that everything can be done while multitasking,
including reading.”
Audible is now funding cognitive research at Rutgers University to study the brain activity
of test subjects while they are reading a text, listening to it, reading and
listening simultaneously, and switching between the two modes. The research is
continuing and has yet to be published, but early results suggest that
listening to a narrator may be more emotionally engaging than silent reading,
particularly for men, says Guy Story, Audible’s chief scientist.
So there you have it — the data is inconclusive, at best, but
given that audiobooks are more often consumed while multitasking, there’s some cause
for concern that audiobooks lead to less immersion, less of the feeling of
getting “sucked in” to a book. (But with a good narrator or voice cast, you may actually have more emotional engagement in the story.)
Which raises the further question: How important is that “lost
in a good book” feeling anyway?
Is reading a book like going into trance, or playing music?
Whether you think there’s a difference between brief,
distracted reading periods and long, focused reading periods depends on what
you think reading a good book is like. Is the best metaphor playing a piece of
complicated music on the piano (based on the idea that every reader interprets
the book and conjures imagery in his or her head?) Is it like entering a kind
of trance, or meditative state? Is it work? Play?
If reading is like a trance, or something else that your
brain engages in more deeply over time, then you would expect that a few hours
at a stretch reading a book would be more rewarding than a similar amount of
time divided into 15-minute sessions. But if it’s like a form of play, then maybe
a smattering of short bursts is the same as one long engagement.
We have some evidence that there are different styles of
reading, and that they engage your brain differently — a couple years ago, Stanford
University researchers had people read a chapter of Jane Austen in different
ways, and put them into an fMRI machine to see what happened to their
brains. And indeed, leisurely “pleasure reading” lit up different
areas of the brain than intense “close reading,” in which the
participants paid close attention to every word and tried to analyze it. The
“close reading,” in particular, lit up typically underused sections
of the brain.
And here’s
a literature review which claims that there’s evidence the process of
reading on a screen is “cognitively different” than the process of
reading on paper, in part because you tend to jump around the page more and
there are more distractions.(In
general, there are a number of people out there claiming that the mere fact
that words are on a screen rather than paper changes how your brain interacts with
them as objects — but that sounds like a different concern, and I’m not
convinced there’s really a neurological difference per se between electronic
and paper documents.)
There’s also evidence that people who read fiction for
pleasure are more
open-minded and more able to deal with uncertainty.
But the strongest argument that there’s a difference between
long dedicated reading sessions and quickies comes from a Time
Magazine essay by Annie Murphy Paul from last summer, in which she claims:
The deep reader, protected from distractions and attuned to
the nuances of language, enters a state that psychologist Victor Nell, in a
study of the psychology of pleasure reading, likens to a hypnotic trance. Nell
found that when readers are enjoying the experience the most, the pace of their
reading actually slows. The combination of fast, fluent decoding of words and
slow, unhurried progress on the page gives deep readers time to enrich their
reading with reflection, analysis, and their own memories and opinions. It
gives them time to establish an intimate relationship with the author, the two
of them engaged in an extended and ardent conversation like people falling in
love.
This is not reading as many young people are coming to know
it. Their reading is pragmatic and instrumental: the difference between what
literary critic Frank Kermode calls “carnal reading” and “spiritual reading.” If we
allow our offspring to believe carnal reading is all there is — if we don’t
open the door to spiritual reading, through an early insistence on discipline
and practice — we will have cheated them of an enjoyable, even ecstatic
experience they would not otherwise encounter.
You can read Victor Nell’s study, published in 1988, here
— Nell argues that there’s something called “ludic reading,” which
is basically reading for pleasure. Anything can be a vehicle for “ludic
reading,” even “a torn scrap of newsprint,” but fiction is most
often the focus. Nell did five different studies of what happens when you read
for pleasure — and he did find that you slow down, but also that skilled
readers “move freely between bolting text and savoring it,” depending
on whether they were at one of the good parts in the story. And he found some
evidence that “ludic reading” causes cognitive changes in habitual
readers.
So is the hammock an essential reading tool, whether you’re
on a Kindle or a giant hardcover? Is a certain amount of bodily relaxation and
mental focus an essential ingredient, that’s in danger of being lost?
As I said before, it depends on what metaphor for reading
you favor — but it does feel, subjectively, as though when I pick up a book
for a spell here and there, I tend to forget the details of the plot more and maybe
get less engrossed in the story. And books, even more than television or
movies, may reward sustained, slow attention in a way that can’t be replicated
with speed-reading apps and random glances.
The real worry is that if people wind up reading in a less
rewarding fashion, they’ll get fewer rewards from reading — and then books
will become less an object of passionate love and more of a momentary
distraction, after all. But then again, books have changed constantly, since
the invention of the printing press. And the biggest lesson from all the
studies of reading behavior and the brain is that our brains aren’t formed to
deal with books — rather, books are designed to cope with our brains and their
ever-changing needs.
