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READING "PRIDE AND PREJUDICE" ON AN IPHONE

Stephanie Troeth over at the Book Oven Blog has written a considered response to Megan Buskey's post about e-books, in which she wondered whether electronic devices--such as the Kindle and iPhone--are hospitable places for literature. Doesn't concentration and contemplation requre the static calm of a printed page? Troeth suggests otherwise:

A couple of months ago, I started a casual experiment on looking at what kind of content I would conceivably read on my iPhone — I’ve got Classics, Stanza, and eReader installed amongst others for documents. I completely devoured “Pride and Prejudice” on the Classics app while on recent travels. Similarly, I am hooked on Hemingway using eReader. But when it came to some Dante, no amount of formatting adjustment could beat the experience of reading “The Inferno” in paper form — it’s hard to top my edition that has Italian on one side and English on a facing page. In any case, it has come to the point whereby if there’s a book I want, I’d search for it as an e-book first. Failing that, I would look into a paper version if it’s not available electronically.

My thinking so far is that stories that propel you forward will suck you in regardless of what you use to read them. It seems that poetry may not work so well on a small screen; my humble theory is that poetry needs whitespace to give weight to the words and help get the rhythm across. As for multilingual content — without more eloquent interface design — paper still wins. I’ve devoured blog posts, long articles, even academic papers on the iPhone without any trouble. As proponents of the e-book keep saying: it’s just great to be able to read anytime, anywhere — provided there’s electricity to keep our devices nicely charged.

Now we all know that "Pride and Prejudice" is basically high-fallutin', page-turnin' chick-lit. And I will always giggle when I recall the chest-beating zeal of a colleague, who tizzily declared the Kindle was the way of the future just before misplacing the power outlet of his own new one (making it a rather sleepy avant-garde soldier). Yet these apps seem terribly practical for any number of things, including accessing "A Farewell to Arms" on an impromptu train journey. Poetry, however, does seem more in need of a printed page--Troeth's "whitespace" theory is an elegant one.

~ EMILY BOBROW