So The Speculative Turn is now readable online as a PDF on re.press’s website. I cannot fault the logistical reasons why Open Access PDF’s are gaining popularity, so they should. I could never understand anyone who would wish to anti-democratise academic publication by making work expensive, hard to read or password-segregated.
But heres the thing – I cannot abide reading scholarly work on a computer screen. This can never be possible for me, it might be for others and let me know if you are in any way different or if it fails to bother you. However for me, the act of reading a whole book online seems to be one of general annoyance both in the material constraints and the contextual circumstance. Blog posts don’t have this problem obviously, but then, they aren’t usually sustained arguments and therefore are not usually as dense. If a blog post is over the 2000 word mark, then I usually become ‘optically-tired’ as when I try to read an open access PDF.
The act of reading a open access version (and crucially it must be viewed as a version) is a problem on a computer. And the worst thing is, I can’t put my finger on why it should be the case that reading a PDF is the worse option. Maybe it is the lack of of having something material available at hand; of having something tangible to hold, pencil mark, notify and intentionally dog-ear. I don’t want to solely criticise it on the lack of materiality, like some sort of naturalistic moron, but I find that reading dense passages (especially philosophical ones) requires far more concentration online that reading an actual paper-based publication. My concentration wains after a few minutes, and I fail even to make the basic connections in the same chapter, let alone a sustained argument during 200 – 300 pages. Whereas on paper, I can flick between pages from either end of the book in reference to previous notes with ease and I can comfortably read from anywhere I choose (as is often the case with one of Zizek’s eclectic offerings for example).
Zooming in and out fails to address the situation. Whether its the customary position that a user takes between screen, keyboard, mouse and chair, there is no single ‘good’ way of reading a PDF online, period. Theres probably something phenomenological about this that Merleau-Ponty would pick up on. With a printed text, we always know how to adjust the publication to read it in just the right way, despite the usually less than ideal contexts we find ourselves in. We move to find more light, less light, hold the publication in the right way, etc. No amount of adjusting can create the ideal situation when reading online – I’m even tempted to suggest that there isn’t one.
And so you think, ‘well just print it out then’. Translating one version into a material paper based version is obviously better from the standpoint of marking pages. But now you just pine for a binding machine. The additional problem here is that unbound pages have a tendency to get mixed up and destroyed. (I actually did this with Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks; I printed out hundreds of pages on duplex. After a number of weeks, the whole whack of papers became unreadable, dirty, dog-eared – [in the accidental sense this time], lost pages, etc.) The physical bound book won out, and won my money.
Then there is context. It does not matter where you try to read Open Access Publications, it is still strangely rubbish. Interesting, for me, this occurs no matter what platform I read it on; laptop, iPad, desktop etc., it is always far from ideal. The interaction between eye and simulated word is still a challenging exercise and even worse if you are easily distracted. I also feel horribly annoyed by the constraint of battery life on mobile electronic platforms, which distracts me even more. Distribution does not provide the equality of concentration, but the constraint of simulated print.
More and more, I find that the basic element of reading scholarly works is absorption. And for Open Access Publications, absorption is an element of scholarship sorely lacking. Actually, I’m tempted to suggest the same for viewing simulated artworks online (unless the artwork is deliberately constructed to work in the confines of the web).
Interestingly, a couple of weeks away from the Public Interface conference in Aarhus, they have kindly posted a whole printed and bounded reader of important texts, ready for the conference. Now this is more likely to get me up to speed on the conference than a host of URLs, that I cannot concentrate on.
6 Comments
Robert, one word: Kindle.
I got one for Christmas, it’s already loaded with books. Puts together the techno-geek and the philosophy-nerd in me. It’s brilliant. I actually thought of writing a small ‘review’ of how versatile it is for academic use – I might do that in the next few days.
Hey Fabio,
As I don’t own a Kindle, I can’y pass any authoritative comment on them, but its good to see that you are finding it versatile. I guess its a toss up between versatility and instant access (plus adept programming skills of porting PDF’s onto Kindles) and the materiality of bookshelves and bespoke noting systems.
For the same reasons, and the same issues, this impact could be similar if you are a vinyl lover and you see everyone using Mp3 players. The ipod has changed music – no question – but you sacrifice quality of music on mpeg3 format and the materiality of record collections in favour of versatility and instant access. Now, quality of music may not be the same as the quality of writing – but perhaps the circumstances of reading scholarly paper-based work cannot be ported over electronically. Maybe the Kindle resolves this – we shall see!
This is why I personally still buy books if I want to read them cover-to-cover. It can be quite cheap if you buy, read, and then resell, retaining just the PDF for future reference. Of course, I often seem to like having things on my shelf, so they don’t always get resold after I’ve read them.
The PDF version is really nice for future reference, though. Even a good index pales in comparison to the ability to do fulltext search, particularly in the case (common for me) where I remember a few words from a passage and want to find it again.
Hey Mark
Its a tricky thing indeed. I tend to agree with Graham Harman’s response here, its far from ideal at the moment, but at some point, some authentic reading experience will translate onto an electronic device. And yes, thank you for pointing out the ability to full text search within a PDF; this trumps Indexing hands down. For reading purposes maybe I’m being too harsh in my original post. Perhaps all that is needed is a quality screen coupled with a extremely light-weight base and all my troubles would be over.
And yes, one thing I do disagree with Graham’s post is the aesthetic purposes of owning a book shelf, and visiting homes that offer a substantial amount of books. Like a DVD or CD collection, we often get a large amount of information from perusing someones collection. If a whole bookcase became solely electronic, that would be a shame (Maybe special editions would suffice – like Graham suggests).
But for scholarship reading and note-taking, the issue becomes complex when electronic devices fail to replicate elements such as note taking or dog-earing. We all have our own funny ways of referencing pages and paragraphs for future use. Perhaps we shouldn’t take the view that Kindles and iPads have to fit our personal note taking needs. I suppose what I’m saying is, could mobile PDF readers and hard drives handle bespoke note taking systems without succumbing to something akin to Microsoft Word’s note-taking features. The thought of applying Word’s notes system to a Kindle’s makes me shudder.
A number of my recent projects are experiments with new forms of books and distributions. This was something I was hoping to address with the first vol of Speculations where I was planning on creating a DIY version that could be easily printed and hand-bound using common household materials. This will have to wait for vol. 2. I’m also excited about the ability to create new interactive texts. I’m hoping to try one of these out for Speculations II as well. This would be a swf file that reads more like a book then a website but would allow for embedded video, audio and hyperlinks.
But what I’m most excited about is a new project of mine called GutenbAAAAARG which will be a series of tutorials that lead people through the process of how to turn any pdf on AAAAAR.ORG into a DIY book, again using common household materials (like glue, needle & thread, ink jet printer, etc).
Stay tuned. It’s 2011, the future is almost here.
That sounds fantastic Thomas – look forward to seeing it. Speculations 2 is beginning to sound very procedural. I thought about the idea of doing something akin to an ‘app’ version of speculations or something like that, but you may have problems starting with Flash if you consider that most of todays academic audience may prefer seeing it on IPad iPhone, etc – although there are ways around that. You could always ‘go Apple’ and do it on HTML5 as an alternative.
And as you might have guessed, your project GutenAAAAARG sounds right up my street. I adore the democratic principles of AAAARG.org and use it constantly for checking references and footnotes, but hate reading the material on the screen. (I wonder how Kindles interact with scanned and converted PDFs?) I might be preaching to the converted here – the project sounds like a practice similar to Bogost’s carpentry – actively getting involved with objects and transforming them. Bogost envisages this as destroying of the theory/practice divide.
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