Switching from paper books to ebooks may turn into a transition away from books altogether.

Once you're on the iPad/Kindle Fire, it's so tempting to do other things too — email, Facebook, Googling here and there — that you lose the single-minded concentration that pulls you straight through a book.

Not that everyone reads books that way. You might have piles of paper books around the house that you dip into and keep meaning to finish. The nice thing about ebooks is you don't see them lying around and feel guilty.

Me, I've found a way to read ebooks that gives me that internetty feeling I love. I have hundreds of books in my iPad (where I use the Kindle app, and read books bought on Amazon). I keep my list of books in the order most recently read, and I like to pick something near the bottom of the list, read it until I get itchy for a distraction, then select another book near the bottom.

Why not? Well, the linked article takes the point of view of booksellers. They're worried people will stop reading things in book form. Me, I'm a blogger. It's a market. People will buy what they want. There are other choices that to be trapped in one author's mind for days on end.

"When I read a book, I'm handling a specific object in a specific time and place."

"The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that's reassuring."

Jonathan Franzen worries that ebooks — in place of print books — will reorient us in negative ways.

"Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough."

For serious readers, Franzen said, "a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience". "Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn't change," he continued. "Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don't have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government."

The acclaimed author of Freedom and The Corrections – which are published as ebooks – has said in the past that "it's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction". He seals the ethernet port on his own computer to prevent him connecting to the internet while he writes, also removing the card so he is unable to play computer games and wearing noise-cancelling headphones to prevent distraction.

Of course, the internet and the fluidity of etexts have changed us, and the changes should be particularly upsetting to fiction writers. In the future, who will sit down with a tome and become one with the sealed-off complete world created by a novelist? The internet is calling. Who can read a book? To read books now, I load them up in my iPad and read some of one and then another and another. I rotate the texts to give reading books more of a feeling of clicking all over the place on the internet. That feels more exciting and natural to me now.

Does my iPad book mix include any Frantzen? Yeah, I've got "How to Be Alone" — a collection of essays, nonfiction. And my audiobook collection, which I listen to in bits and shreds, includes "The Discomfort Zone" — which is nonfiction, a memoir full of relatively disconnected scenes.

Speaking of impermanence and dissolution, Franzen says:

"One of the consolations of dying is that... 'Well, that won't have to be my problem'... Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don't see how you could stand it psychologically."

Well, you could take off the noise-cancellation headphones, plug the ethernet back in, and flow and float through change on a minute-by-minute basis. But that would only deprive you of what Franzen sees as a basis for a positive attitude toward death. You'll still die in the end, but without the consolation of being saved from what you found unbearable — change.

Now, I'm seeing in Franzen's reasoning the notion that we ought to want to curl up with a good long fiction book in order to relinquish our hold on life. Is that what draws us, instead, into the vivid, roiling experience of ever-changing texts on the web? It's life, and we want to live.

"Ask me an interesting question... and I'll answer 10-15 every week..."

A simple enough Twitter project, by Yoko Ono.

do you consider the internet to be a nutopian space?
It is one of the nutopian spaces....

I recently watched the film LET IT BE and I wonder why you didn’t smile through the whole thing. You have such a lovely smile.
My smile was erased....

How do you always stay so grounded? So often I find myself floating away from all this.
Look at the steps we take when we walk. Our steps are made of floating and grounding, each time we take the step. So don’t worry. You are grounding and floating, every day, as you walk. You should walk more.

Ha ha. I like Yoko Ono. I was thinking of her today because I was thinking of my habit of thinking up ideas for books, which I don't write. That made me think of Yoko's old book "Grapefruit," which — yes, it is a book — describes projects, things that could be done easily, things that could be done but are too tedious or too hard to do, and things that are completely impossible. The descriptions are charmingly minimal. I'd quote some, but you'd get the wrong idea. Go over to the link and check some pages out. You can search inside the book. Try, for example, searching for "cloud."

It seems that the real project is stating one imagined project after another. Think of it, then let it go. Imagine all the unwritten books. Have you read them?

When a book falls into my hands, I open it up and read a sentence — and maybe that ends up being the only sentence I read.

Today's book just came in the mail. It's "The End of Straight Supremacy: Realizing Gay Liberation," by Shannon Gilreath. The sentence happened to be:

Feminists have persuasively shown the connection between sexualized violence, which, if we are being generous, might be the kind of "idea" First Amendment mucks are apparently concerned about (violence in the head), and real violence, inflicted through sex in the home or in the street, against women.

Mucks? I guess that's short for "high-muck-a-muck." Which means: poohbah.

And my response is: Pooh. Bah.

The scholarly press book... "isn’t dead; it is undead."

Says Kathleen Fitzpatrick.

IN THE COMMENTS: Yashu says:

While Fitzpatrick makes some good points (e.g. about problems with the peer review process-- though I'm not sure I buy her solution), the main thrust of her argument makes me break out in hives. It's the Elizabeth Warren political vision, advocating the priority of "community" over "individual achievement." It's Warren's critique of the business world transposed to academia (where "professorial culture is infected by pride in individual achievements and prejudice against publishing models that would de-emphasize them"):

I don’t think academics need to be "humbled," but would instead say that we need to reconfigure our priorities and understand that insofar as we have operated as individuals, it has always been by building on the work of others, and by putting our work into circulation such that it can be built upon. Some fields of course already operate in predominantly collaborative ways, as do most successful online projects, but the humanities in general have a deeply ingrained belief in the primacy of the individual voice. If we are going to take full advantage of the new ways of working that digital technologies make available, scholars will have to consider the possibility that we can accomplish more collectively than we can alone. This is not to say that the individual voice will be wholly subsumed within that of the Borg. Instead, it is meant to suggest that that voice will very often be found in more direct dialogue with other scholars, an interconnectedness that will make clear that, in fact, the individual voice that we so value has never been alone.

As you note, shifting our focus from the individual to the collaborative will require us to get past some fairly entrenched assumptions. We in the humanities will need to think differently about “credit,” so that collaborative work will count in hiring, tenure, and promotion processes. We’ll also need to develop new means of citing the contributions that our colleagues make to our work as it develops. But even more than our processes, we need to change our mindset: we need to understand ourselves as working toward collective goals; we need to value work done on behalf of a community as much as we do work that serves ourselves.

Yashu continues here.

"Look, if you put the Internet on the device I am supposed to be using to read, I will never read again."

"Can you blame me? I am only human. I can’t focus. If all these studies about multitasking have taught us anything, it is that we all think we can multitask but no one actually can.... It’s not that people will stop reading. We do vast amounts of reading online every day — the equivalent of a good Hemingway novel. But it’s not deep but broad, not focused but fast."

Oh, now, now... is Hemingway actually deeper than your favorite blog?

***

Show your love for reading and for the Althouse blog by buying your Kindle Fire here.

What do you think of Ron Reagan's "My Father at 100"?

I'm noticing this book because Instapundit did one of his "IN THE MAIL" posts that acknowledge the receipt of a free book but express no opinion. Sending one free book is a frightfully cheap way to buy publicity. I get free books, but I wouldn't post about them unless I took the time to form some kind of opinion about them, and sending me a free book is a frightfully cheap way to buy my time, the time it would take to form an opinion of a book.

But I don't even need to look beyond the author and title of Ron Reagan's "My Father at 100" to form an opinion. It annoys me. I've seen too much — not all that much — TV commentary by Ron Reagan to want to read a book he wrote about the iconic conservative President. Example:

Reagan: My father knew what he stood for, you can agree with it or disagree with it, he knew how -- what he stood for, he could explain what he stood for. He was conversant in domestic and foreign policy -- [Sarah Palin is] neither! She can't explain where she stands on anything!

Geller: Your father would love her, and frankly I don't think you can speak for your father, because you -- you don't even espouse --

Reagan: No, Pam, actually, have you ever met my father, Pam? Pam, did you ever meet my father?... Did you ever meet my father? I'm asking you a simple question. You can't answer that because the answer is no. So why don't you rely on someone who knew him very well to tell you what he would think of Sarah Palin.

Yes, the 100th anniversary of his birth is an occasion, an excuse, but the birthdayness of it also says: twaddle.

"Books which are... extended versions of articles written for The Atlantic, The Public Interest or what have you are especially likely to be over-long for their topic..."

"...  don’t remember ever reading one of these books and feeling that I got substantial insights which were unavailable in the original article (in some cases it might have been useful to have a better sourced and slightly better fleshed out version of the original piece available somewhere, perhaps half the length again of the original piece, but there doesn’t appear to be a market for that)."

Wow. Does that ever resonate with me! I just paid $25+ for a 300+-page book that was an expansion of an article from The Atlantic. I did that for a Bloggingheads diavlog, and — you'll see when it's up — the author scolded me for skimming. Did that open the door for me to scold her for padding? Readers and writers — we all have our tactics and must guard our own interests. You pad. I skim. Or I take a look in the bookstore and put that thing right back on the pile. Unless I'm scheduled for a diavlog. In which case, I tough it out. Up to a point. Then I just scream. On my blog.

Are long novels still worth reading?

The books Obama is supposedly reading on his vacation.

The list:

• The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller based in Washington;
• Lush Life by Richard Price, a story of race and class set in New York's Lower East Side;
• Tom Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded, on the benefits to America of an environmental revolution;
• John Adams by David McCullough;
• Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a drama about the life of eight different characters living in a Colorado prairie community.

I never believe Presidents are actually reading the books their people tell us they're reading, so, for me, the only question is what they thought they were saying with these titles and why they thought it was a good idea to say that.

If you could pick a book for Obama to read — actually read — what book would you pick? If he could make you read a book of his choice, what do you think it would be? If you picked political books or history books or economics books, please pick again and be more out there so this late night discussion isn't too boring.

***

I'm just noticing that all Obama's books are written by men. Maybe these really are the books he's reading. If it's PR, his PR people have a big blind spot.

ADDED: Didn't everyone who wanted to read that bloated John Adams book already read it? And wasn't Obama supposed to be reading that Tom Friedman book last year?

Friedman’s dumb books full of “I went golfing somewhere in India, reminding me of the Asian pizza I ate at the airport in Dubai” globalization-fellating idiocy are Required Reading in certain middlebrow circles....

[O]nce “going green” became so safely uncontroversial that motherfucking Garfield was eating solar-powered lasagna, it was time for Tom Friedman to incoherently rebuke everything he ever wrote before — about Earth and how for some insane reason he thinks saying it’s “flat” is some deep enigmatic statement of the times rather than, really, just an idiot trying to make up a catch phrase. So, once the carbon-farting global golfer hitched his tortured prose to the Green bandwagon, everybody in every management situation had to act like they read this awful book.

But they didn’t. Nobody read the whole thing. Of course it’s still on Barack Obama’s fake reading list. And there it will stay, year after year, just like back in the 1990s when Dan Quayle comically claimed that he tried (and failed) to read Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince each summer, because that seemed — to Dan Quayle, anyway — like the kind of thing a politician maybe should’ve know about, 20 years ago.

"Yawn. Hipster dud bookseller hates his customers. What’s new?"

You go to all that trouble to elaborate numerous categories and subcategories of people and that's what you get for your first comment? Life is harsh!

Well, there's some interesting detail in those categories (along with some boring humor — e.g. "a $4 half-soy-half-decaf-latte-with-a-shot-of-pretention").

I found that 7 types of bookstore customer post via an Ezra Klein tweet. Ezra parks himself in the category "Browser."

I think there's an 8th category, into which I'd put myself. "Reminiscer." This is someone who used to hang around bookstores all the time and leave with a pile of miscellaneous books, but now drops in only occasionally, looks around, and remembers when she didn't spent nearly all of her reading time on line. Now, all those book covers look like front pages of websites. She might click on a few — i.e. open them up and read a few lines, maybe even a few pages — and then she contemplates the way she used to feel that she needed to make these blocky objects into personal possessions and proceed through them systematically, front to back. Then she shakes off that reverie and goes somewhere else, somewhere where the WiFi is free.

"That was how I felt, and that she had draped herself in unflattering prudery, unflattering and almost pre-modern."

Marty Peretz reminisces about how he felt on watching Anita Hill testify, back in 1991. It's his strategy for writing about the Clarence Thomas memoir without reading it. And he's got a backup anecdote to flesh out his musings about the aura around the unread book:

A large Cambridge dinner party a few years ago comes to mind. I won't say at whose house. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't seated next to Al Sharpton, an interloper. (Sharpton had arrived with someone else but uninvited. The hostess was furious.) I was seated next to Anita Hill, an attractive woman and an interesting woman. We spoke about how the loss of the King James version in our culture had degraded the writing and speaking of the English language. Then, as if our conversation lacked something, she raised the name of Clarence Thomas. Sad, no?