Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading by Jason Merkoski
Authors: Jason Merkoski
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attention to the words. Your midbrain moves your eye along them, and your thalamus focuses your attention on each letter or word that you’re reading. From within the cingulate gyrus, your eyes are directed to each of the words, and then your brain checks to see if the word you’re reading is familiar or comprehensible.
Just as a web browser caches parts of a website for faster access later, your brain does the same thing for words. There are caches of visual word-forms for your reference in the part of the brain called area 37 of your occipital-temporal region. Your temporal lobe then translates these symbols into sounds, and the anterior gyrus in the back of your head converts these sounds into your interior monologue, the voice you hear inside your head. Your left temporal lobe and right cerebellum and Broca’s area are all brought to bear on making meaning out of this flow of sounds.
It’s a complex sausage factory that fits inside your skull, and it moves swiftly, taking no more than 100 milliseconds per word and often less, as long as nothing gets in the way. As long as there are no distractions like strange flickers or ghosts, what you see on an e-reader is just as meaningful to your inner monologue as what you read in a printed book.
Okay, that was all very technical. So let me emphasize the important thing: there’s no cognitive difference in reading a sentence in a print book versus a digital book.
However, there’s more to a book than the sentences inside it. After a lifetime of habitual reading, your brain is used to considering the whole page of a book in its entirety. Your brain is used to having a dialogue, if you will, with the typographer and page layout artist of the book you’re reading. That’s why the occasional use of a new font or a drop-cap—or heck, even an italicized word—helps you stay focused. It keeps your brain from yawning and switching to something else. With e-readers, though, this dialogue often stutters. The digital page is often bereft of nuance, of any anchor besides a list of monotonously formatted words, like plain black beads on an invisible string.
When you talk to neuroscientists about how the brain works, they’ll tell you that a book is meaningless if you don’t actively engage with it. That’s why poets use unexpected word combinations, or why Friedrich Nietzsche used irony, or why David Foster Wallace used footnotes. These touches disorient you as you read, forcing you to put 10.5 watts of energy into the reading process to actually focus on what you’re reading. Why did I say 10.5 watts? It could have been any number, but it was unexpected. It got your attention, and you’re more likely to remember this passage now than you would have been if I wrote it in a dry, journalistic way without any memorable facts to catch your attention.
There’s something important and touching about the palpable physical presence of a book: it engages the senses. In this way, the act of turning pages helps to anchor information, because we have a visual, geometric sense of where one page is in relation to all the others in a book, a tactile dog-eared map. This is something we lose with e-readers. We’re used to processing a 3D world around us in everyday life, and while many e-readers have built-in progress meters to show you where you are within a book, they’re often insufficient.
Such 2D progress meters require some mental agility to use. They’re no better than gas meters on a car, which show you’re halfway through a tank but don’t tell you how many miles or gallons you have to go until empty. By comparison, there’s no ignoring the handiness of the physical presence of a book as you hold it and the sense of achievement in knowing how far through it you’ve come.
With ebooks, we also lose the ability to flip back and forth quickly through pages, as we can in a print book. I can flip through perhaps a hundred pages per second in a print book as I look for a given
Just as a web browser caches parts of a website for faster access later, your brain does the same thing for words. There are caches of visual word-forms for your reference in the part of the brain called area 37 of your occipital-temporal region. Your temporal lobe then translates these symbols into sounds, and the anterior gyrus in the back of your head converts these sounds into your interior monologue, the voice you hear inside your head. Your left temporal lobe and right cerebellum and Broca’s area are all brought to bear on making meaning out of this flow of sounds.
It’s a complex sausage factory that fits inside your skull, and it moves swiftly, taking no more than 100 milliseconds per word and often less, as long as nothing gets in the way. As long as there are no distractions like strange flickers or ghosts, what you see on an e-reader is just as meaningful to your inner monologue as what you read in a printed book.
Okay, that was all very technical. So let me emphasize the important thing: there’s no cognitive difference in reading a sentence in a print book versus a digital book.
However, there’s more to a book than the sentences inside it. After a lifetime of habitual reading, your brain is used to considering the whole page of a book in its entirety. Your brain is used to having a dialogue, if you will, with the typographer and page layout artist of the book you’re reading. That’s why the occasional use of a new font or a drop-cap—or heck, even an italicized word—helps you stay focused. It keeps your brain from yawning and switching to something else. With e-readers, though, this dialogue often stutters. The digital page is often bereft of nuance, of any anchor besides a list of monotonously formatted words, like plain black beads on an invisible string.
When you talk to neuroscientists about how the brain works, they’ll tell you that a book is meaningless if you don’t actively engage with it. That’s why poets use unexpected word combinations, or why Friedrich Nietzsche used irony, or why David Foster Wallace used footnotes. These touches disorient you as you read, forcing you to put 10.5 watts of energy into the reading process to actually focus on what you’re reading. Why did I say 10.5 watts? It could have been any number, but it was unexpected. It got your attention, and you’re more likely to remember this passage now than you would have been if I wrote it in a dry, journalistic way without any memorable facts to catch your attention.
There’s something important and touching about the palpable physical presence of a book: it engages the senses. In this way, the act of turning pages helps to anchor information, because we have a visual, geometric sense of where one page is in relation to all the others in a book, a tactile dog-eared map. This is something we lose with e-readers. We’re used to processing a 3D world around us in everyday life, and while many e-readers have built-in progress meters to show you where you are within a book, they’re often insufficient.
Such 2D progress meters require some mental agility to use. They’re no better than gas meters on a car, which show you’re halfway through a tank but don’t tell you how many miles or gallons you have to go until empty. By comparison, there’s no ignoring the handiness of the physical presence of a book as you hold it and the sense of achievement in knowing how far through it you’ve come.
With ebooks, we also lose the ability to flip back and forth quickly through pages, as we can in a print book. I can flip through perhaps a hundred pages per second in a print book as I look for a given
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