WWCD? (What Would Carr Do?)

eBooks and eTexts...What does Nicholas Carr think? Is it really to anyone’s surprise that he’s not a fan? While Carr does see the value in eBooks, he is also a staunch critic of the new medium. It is easy to guess what he would think about these eTexts in 2017, because The Shallows, while written in 2010, has an entire chapter dedicated to eBooks: Chapter 6 “The Very Image of a Book.”

In this chapter, Carr lays out the benefits of traditional print and electronic books as follows:

Benefits of Print Books	So What?
timeless/eternal	no batteries to charge
resilient	can drop in the sand at the beach, sit on them, spill coffee on them and they are none the worse for wear
relatively portable	with exceptions of gigantic textbooks, dictionaries, and Anna Karenina
easy to navigate	can flip to parts both past and future, without needing to know the exact page number
easy to annotate	scribble in the margins, highlight, underline all you like, as long as it's not a library book, please

Benefits of eBooks	So What?
portable	can hold an entire personal library in one device - no need to schlep heavy hardbacks around town
economical	eBooks usually cost dramatically less to both purchase and manufacture
green	think of all the paper you’ll save!
user friendly	forward and back buttons are self-explanatory, no need to go to the library or bookstore - books can be downloaded directly from online book sellers
customizable/adaptable	built in dictionaries and author bios, read-aloud features, and increasable text size help books become more accessible to all

After - briefly - discussing the pros of eBooks, he then dedicates the rest of the chapter to describing everything that’s wrong with them, including a prediction of how they will ruin literary discourse completely. Dramatic, to say the least.

So what’s so bad about eBooks? Carr himself admits that the book has been the “most resistant to the Net’s influence,” as there’s not a whole lot that can be done to “a long sequence of printed pages.” Or so we think. For all the praise that eBooks have gotten, Carr calls it all “wishful thinking,” and accuses supporters as naive, with an “inability to see how change in the medium’s form is also a change in its content.”

Now you may be asking yourself, How different can Jane Eyre really be on my Kindle compared to the printed version? A fair question, to be sure. Carr doesn’t take issue with eBooks themselves, or even Kindles for that matter. He even praises how the Kindle has avoided the backlit LED screen for one that resembles paper and reduces eye strain, a common struggle for those who read a lot of online text.

Carr’s worry is more about where they are headed. He quotes a senior vice president from HarperStudios (an offshoot of publisher HarperCollins), who wants his eBook designers to “create something dynamic to enhance the experience.” This includes adding hyperlinks, embedding video (to create something Simon & Schuster are calling "vooks") and allowing readers to connect with each other via an in-reader platform similar to social media. Carr notes that these so-called “enhancements” just “turns it into something very like a Web site.” No longer are our books just books; they have become yet another hypertext we have to navigate - one that interrupts and distracts us as intensely as any other Web-based text. Carr quotes author Steven Johnson, who laments that “total immersion...will be compromised,” and our abilities for reflection and deeper thinking will surely go the way of the Dodo. Carr imagines a future world in which readers “chat and pass virtual notes while scanning electronic text” like naughty teenagers rather than reading and comprehending the text.

This shift in reading will also begin to affect the way we write. Carr references the popularity of “cell phone novels” in Japan: narratives stories written solely on a mobile device and posted piecemeal via an online social media platform or blog. He worries that as our reading becomes “scanning,” our writing will also evolve to fit our new superficial, easily distracted brains: “Writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style...our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and loss of eloquence.”

Does such a grim future truly await us? Or is Carr simply overreacting? What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below, and be sure to tune in next week to see what the research says as well as  learn my Thoughts and Opinions on the matter. See you then!