walkitout | skimming e-books (Reply)

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I read e-books, in general, a little faster than paper books, however, not by skimming. It feels a little harder to skim an e-book than it does to skim a paper book, partly because of the hassle of typing in a location number on the kindle. Perhaps on the iPad with the touch screen and the slider, but there is still no equivalent to what can be done flipping paper pages really fast and picking up phrases as they go by (like watching cards being shuffled). I feel like people passing judgment about the other kinds of skimming (where you do in fact look at all the words, but at paces that do or do not allow for subvocalization, for example, or which give cognitive time to analyze word use, or which only give time for analyzing rhetorical structure, or which only give time to assimilate the argument without any analysis at all) should supply a lot more information up front about what their expectations are. There's a lot of reading assigned in college which doesn't deserve any more time than content assimilation: it's too poorly argued to waste time on the rhetorical structure and too poorly written to experience the pain of paying attention to the word use.

Given the number of people buying previous editions of texts used on the internet and the moaning resignation of online debate about that, I figure they're all used to people having to figure out which page to go to anyway (which is part of my wondering why the unstable pagination is getting everyone's knickers in a twist).

I do know that when I read on an active screen, I engage in a lot of defensive skipping around to give my eyes a rest, that I don't engage in when reading e-ink. If people have a "feeling" about reading not-on-paper, inspection might show that this is not uncommon and source of some of the tension.