opened up War and Peace, held it up, and damned if Campbell wasn’t right. Five thousands years ago, humanity’s crazy adventure with writing began with us holding something small in our hands
The vision has been there for years. It just wasn't the era for all the new technology that would come with it years later. It's amazing how God paves the way for everything. Everything has its time and place,.
Held in the hand, a typical cuneiform tablet is about the same weight and shape as an early mobile phone. Hold it as though you were going to text someone and you hold it the way the scribe did; a proverb had it that ‘a good scribe follows the mouth.’ Motions of the stylus made the tiny triangular indentations of cuneiform characters in the clay. The actions would have been much quicker and more precise, but otherwise rather like the pecks you make at a phone keypad.
This paragraph just answered my question. I now know what a cuneiform tablet is.
Humanity started using cuneiform tablets 5,000
My first time hearing of cuneiform tablets. I'm going to have to google that.
These days, my reading has bifurcated. Contemporary books, I mostly read in print. This is partly because I still like paper books a lot, but also because I want my local bookstore to survive, so I tend to email them whenever there’s a new book out; they order it in usually within 48 hours, making them essentially as fast as Amazon Prime.
I like the idea that the reader is still reading print. It's good to know both. We need to make sure our bookstores survive. I utilize Amazon quite often.
If you even think of a historic book, you can, 24 seconds later, be peering into its opening pages.
That is a plus that whatever book you think of can be scanned in the internet and pulled up within seconds.
I’d been tricked, it seems, by the formatting of the ebook. It seems that the final 1% of the book wasn’t Tolstoy at all, but a long pile of boilerplate public-domain verbiage.
The reader could've been focused on the idea of reading an digital book that he missed important information. Now that he has the knowledge of a digital book, he probably won't have that issue again.
Wait, wait — he can’t possibly be ending this massive epic in the middle of some obtuse harangue about the difficulty of understanding history?
I don't like books or movies like that. They like to keep you on the edge. Keep you thinking and wondering even after it's over.
I’d read so many of these passages by now that I figured he would eventually get tired and focus back on a central character the final scene. I figured he’d behave, you know, like a normal novelist.
Just goes to show what kind of author he was. No matter where he was in the book he would go on one of his rants. That's probably what made him different. A signature move.
I had been slowly ascending into the high 90s — having read 97%, then 98%, then 99% of the book, as the Kindle’s little corner meter dutifully reported.
From 1-2% and not at 97-99% would be a celebration. In the beginning he probably felt like it was impossible but it was possible. What an accomplishment!
Indeed, I so enjoyed revisiting those notes that I wanted a paper copy of them. Using the Espresso print-on-demand machine at the McNally Jackson bookstore in New York, I had the notes printed up as a small 84-page paperback.
That's awesome when you get to that point. When you can be fluent in both. I would love to be able to highlight and make notes on a device and save it. Being able to print it if needed is a plus also. Makes me think differently about Digital technology.
Midway through the book, voice dictation on the iPhone started to get really, really good. I’d been doing a lot of highlighting while reading Tolstoy, saving my favorite sentences and passages.
That's the challenging part for me. I'm afraid of hitting something and messing the entire thing up. I know the tools are there to do exactly what you can do with a book but if you aren't educated, It can be overwhelming.
The more the weeks went by, the more I began to feel that same deep literary intent when I summoned the text onscreen. Tolstoy’s story had become so rewarding — and my desire to dive in so habitual — that the world melted away.
It's like reading this article for this assignment. I know I have to do it to get a good grade. Sometimes we just have to make ourselves do things we aren't used to doing. Most change is good in the end. often times we're like we should've been changed to the new technology.
When we fold ourselves into these literary yoga poses, it’s a ritual of physicality; we are communicating to ourselves, “I am a reader.”
I took my first yoga class on Wednesday and it was very interesting. At first I was lost and kept telling myself this would be my last class. After the repetitive motions and breathing I started enjoying it. It was different but I would try it again.
We learn just as much, and retain just as much, as we do on paper. As the journalist Ferris Jabr reported in Scientific American, the intellectual differences between paper and bytes may lie in our attitude towards them.
I agree. It's what we are used to. Once we open up to change, we then realize that it's not so bad. Being that its not mandatory we will continue to want to be old school. Which isn't a benefit to or for us because it will cause us to be behind and lost.
We’re lovebombed with the cultural superiority of cracking open a physical novel.
It's good to know that I'm not the only slow leak when it comes to this digital stuff. It's the physical part that helps me. The physical part of holding the book, flipping the pages and highlighting if I need to the makes me happy.
It’s because we expect print to be intellectually engaging.
It's a mind thing but I feel more engaged with an actual printed book. I can flip through the pages freely. It's less stressful in my mind.
When I click on Twitter or, say, the Asphalt 6 driving game, I have a mental orientation that says “Hey! Let me entertain myself, enliven my brain, take a break, and maybe find something funny.”
Sometimes with school assignments I have to take a mental break. I have to walk away so I won't get overwhelmed or frustrated.
The phone’s extreme portability allowed me to fit Tolstoy’s book into my life, and thus to get swept up in it. And it was being swept up that, ironically, made the phone’s distractions melt away. Once you’re genuinely hankering to get back to a book, to delve into the folds of its plot and the clockwork machinations of its characters, you stop needing so much mindfulness to screen out digital diversions. The book becomes the diversion itself, the thing your brain is needling you to engage with.
Once you make reading a book on your phone a daily routine, you will get conformed to Digital reading. Once something gets my attention its hard to be distracted. I can see my self reading a book from my phone and blocking out distractions. It would be must to learn how to block ads. Once I'm really into reading something, I can go all day reading it.
Because I was carrying the book around all the time, I pulled it out all the time: On the subway, walking down the block to get groceries.
In those situations I can see myself reading a book. I drive majority of the time so that wouldn't work for me. I could do that at doctors appointments. It wouldn't work for work because I wouldn't be able to concentrate.
“octavo” format, and it was a very popular way to print books in the 18th century. Books that size (or even smaller, in “duodecimo”) could be easily pocketed or held in one hand; it was for people on the go, tucking reading into their day.
I'm not good with small books either. It would be difficult to read a book that I could carry in my pocket. I could only imagine how tiny the words would be. Thank God for technology in that sense.
I tend to blow up the text into a big font, so a page has only a few hundred words on it. Friends would often peer at my screen and wonder, doesn’t it drive you nuts to read such a big book in such tiny driblets?
That's the part that would get to me. I would hate having to blow the words up and moving the screen. It would cause me to lose my place. It would drive me nuts!
Over 15% of all books sold today are in electronic format,
That percentage will continue to rise. I don't like the idea but it's heading to the Digital world. Soon everything will be all Digital. It's happening in my field of work everyday.
With his old Bible, he could flip through and instantly refind a passage, knowing precisely where to look on the page. But the new layout broke this intellectual muscle-memory
We tend to memorize what we normally do. We get conformed to what our eyes are used to seeing and when we have to change it makes it difficult and frustrating.
They’re generally a hassle to flip through, which is why (as studies show) students really don’t like using digital textbooks.
Digital books are a hassle. I would not recommend a digital book for anyone that's been out of school for a long time, I need that feeling of knowing I can flip the pages myself.
In the early years following the Gutenberg explosion, books were, by modern standards, surprisingly weird and unusable.
I believe it has to do with the era you are in. Books probably felt foreign just like digital books are foreign to me now. We have to keep up with technology whether we want to or not.
After a month of swiping through Tolstoy on my phone, I confronted something I’d gradually been realizing for years: Phones are an awfully ugly place to experience books.
I can't see myself reading a book online for a month. My phone is too small to try to attempt to read a book on it. It would probably take longer than a month for me to read a book from my phone.
Later on, he becomes so curdled in his point-scoring and grudge-settling that he actually begins numbering his sentences.
Seems like he was all over the place. He had so many thoughts on the situation that it was difficult for him to focus.
One minute I’d be reading about the Fire of Moscow, with the invading French soldiers accidentally burning houses to the ground while trying to cook breakfast in the kitchens; the next minute Tolstoy would start rambling on for 5,000 words about how the idiotic punditry of historians “can only satisfy young children.
That would be distracting and confusing for me. I guess after reading so much of the book you would get used to it.
The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.
He should've realized he has no control over nature. We can try but majority of the time nature will win.
In war, nobody is in control, though everyone likes to pretend they are.
Honestly, no one is in control. We do know someone has to lose. No one wants to lose but that's the inevitable. We must be confident that my/our team or side would win and conquer.
At one point, Napoleon’s troops desperately try to impress their commander by fording a river, only to drown in the effort, while Napoleon — studying his plans on the riverbank — doesn’t even notice their efforts.
Trying to impress caused them to loss their lives. People do that today. People try to impress others everyday but end up looking like a fool in the end. It's like they basically set themselves up for the kill.
When he goes back to the drawing-rooms of Russia, he expertly dismantles and lampoons the pretensions of armchair warriors, the chickenhawks who call for war while never risking their own necks
That's right, the ring leaders should go down like the peons.
When it comes to a bad book, as Schopenhauer quipped, “life is too short.”
I would have to agree. Life is too short to waste it on a book that doesn't keep your attention. I would rather move on to another bool that can keep my attention.
“A healthy man can tear himself away from the deepest reflections to say a civil word to someone who comes in and can then return again to his own thoughts.”
That would be hard for me unless I am really interested. One distraction and I can completely forget what I was actually doing. Sad but the truth.
We like to pretend that modern life is uniquely crowded with busywork and demands on our time, that our attention has never been so frayed, and that folks in the past had deeper focus.
Distractions are always there. When I was a child the distractions were TV and outside time. Now that I'm an adult there are numerous distractions such as: kids, work, social media, social life, companion, husband/wife, relatives and others. You have to have control to make it work.
We break it ourselves, voluntarily, checking and rechecking Facebook the instant our mind wanders away from the plot of a novel.
I can honestly say I'm not as bad as I used to be. I can go for weeks without being on social media but I have to force myself to do it. If I post a picture on Facebook, I will constantly check to see how many like I have gotten.
We’re deeply social creatures.
I can totally agree with that. I am a social creature. I will go on Facebook or any social media and spend hours on it. Not my intention but time flies when I'm on any social media.
I used to enjoy alerts; but with War and Peace, I shut them all down.
I'm so lost when it comes to computers. I don't know how or if it's possible to cut them off.
For services like Facebook and Twitter, distraction is central to the business model.
Most definitely the truth! Distractions can make you lose concentration and wander off to another site. I dislike the Ads that you have to wait a certain amount of time before you can skip it.
The cast of characters is so convoluted that early editions shipped with full-spread mappings of who was who, to help you keep it straight in you head.
I'm not trying to read a book that has a mapping of who is who. I would be lost from the start. Too much can make it too complicated and cause you to loss interest before you start the book.
then glanced down to see I was at Location 152 of 25053. I was only sixth-tenths of 1% into the book.
Seeing those numbers can be intimidating and cause you to lose interest. And to think of reading it in small digital print is a turn off.
The downside of a phone is that it’s a teensy portal into a book; the upside is it’s always with you.
The downside to a phone is that it is small. The upside is that you take it everywhere with you. It's convenient because we have our phone all the time.
Then, to bury my feelings of guilt at having failed at finishing a Great Work, I’d hide it in the remote corner of a bookshelf where it would, hopefully, cease to haunt me.
The thought of looking at it on the dresser does make me feel guilty. My plan will be to start reading it again but it never happens. I'll end up giving it to a friend or a family member.
But pretty soon lugging around that brick of Russian thought would become such as hassle that I’d stop leaving the house with it — and pretty soon I’d forget to open it at all.
I'm guilty of this also. Once I buy the book my intentions is to read the book. If I'm not intrigued or engaged in it, I will lose interest quick. The book will end up on my dresser collecting dust.
The truth is, for years I read very few big novels.
I enjoy large novels. If it's a really good book I can read the whole thing in a couple days.
“There are probably people who have read War and Peace on their smartphones,” wrote the New York Times columnist Bob Tedeshi, “but just the thought of spending that much time squinting at a little screen makes my eyes hurt.”
I know there are numerous people that would prefer digital over printed. I'm much older so that plays a big part in me wanting to stick to printed material. It's been over 14 years since I've been in school. When I was in school we had all books.
I’m generally a giddy optimist about digital technologies; I think they’ve given us delightful new ways to make sense of the world and talk to each other.
I enjoy new technology also. Especially when it's user friendly. I think it's more beneficial for social media.
This is why print books aren’t dying off.
Printed books should never dye off. I need it to be proactive.
“Reading [on] paper is active — I’m engaged and thinking, reacting, marking up the page,” said another.
Yes, printed over digital any day. I like to be able to highlight what I think may be important. I am definitely more engaged and absorbing the information better.
Baron found that 85% of young people reported multitasking while reading on a digital device, while only 26% did so with a paper book. “I don’t absorb as much,” complained one.
The way my mind is set up, I have to focus on one thing. I can't look at Facebook and do my assignments. I don't multitask that well. It would have to be one or the other but not both.
When you can’t as easily flip through a text, you feel more at sea.
It is much easier to flip through the pages. It makes me more aware and confident that I'm taking in all the information.
Some of it may simply be due to eyestrain ergonomics: Laptops require you to lean in for a long time to read a book, mobile-phone are shiny mirrors, and even a high-rez Kindle Paperwhite — which I own — feels somehow squintier that the stark contrast of dark ink on paper.
It has been shown that the eyestrain on our eyes can be damaging to our eyes. Too much of looking at the monitors can be damaging to the eyes.
pretty lousy environments for deep, immersive reading.
I can agree with that. With the actual printed information you can flip back and forth for what you need. I'm not so good with digital technology so I try my best to stick with the old school printed material. Age may be a factor in that. Paper books does calm me down and slow me down.
Paper books, in contrast, calm us and slow us down.
I can agree with that. Digital reading is not for me. I need the actual book in my hand. I used a e-book last semester and I struggled with using it. I think it made an impact on the grade that I received. I will take a book/print over digital information any day.
These days, critics of digital reading worry that serious literature sort of can’t be adequately read on high-tech devices. Screens, they fear, are inherently inferior to print.
It depends on the individual. People learn on a different level. As for me, I prefer print. I can focus better.
According to some scholars and pundits, I probably shouldn’t have done this.
The information he is going to include in the reading may offend the scholars and pundits.