Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
Published New York Times: May 28, 2010

I have been reading a lot on my iPad recently, and I have some complaints
— not about the iPad but about the state of digital reading generally. Reading is a subtle thing, and its subtleties are artifacts of a venerable medium: words printed in ink on paper. Glass and pixels aren’t the same.

When I read a physical book, I don’t have to look anywhere else to find out how far I’ve gotten. The iPad e-reader, iBooks, tries to create the illusion of a physical book. The pages seem to turn, and I can see the edges of those that remain. But it’s fake. There are always exactly six unturned pages, no matter where I am in the book.

Now, a larger problem. Books in their digital format look vastly less “finished,” less genuine. And we can vary their font and type size, making them resemble all the more our own word-processed manuscripts. Your poems — no matter how wretched or wonderful they are — will never look as good as Robert Hass’s poems in the print edition of “The Apple Trees at Olema.” But your poems can look almost exactly as ugly — as e-book-like — as the Kindle version of that collection.

All the e-books I’ve read have been ugly — books by Chang-rae Lee, Alvin Kernan, Stieg Larsson — though the texts have been wonderful. But I didn’t grow up reading texts. I grew up reading books. The difference is important.

The rest at NYT.