I read an interview with Will Self this morning in the Guardian. Is the fate of our literary culture sealed? He regrets the passing of “deep reading,” reading in which the reader is fully immersed in the text. The opposite of deep reading is shallow reading, the kind of reading I do when surfing the web, an idle activity. I catch the gist of a piece and flick to the next item, trying to pick out what is interesting to me and move on. This style of reading is the kind I do in the stacks in a library or wandering in a bookstore. Read just enough to decide if I want to check out or buy the book. Then I take it home and read it. If it is good, I read it as deeply as it deserves or resonates with my interests. Reading is a continuum that runs from shallow to deep. I imagine it is the same for most readers.
Do I read electronic texts deeply? Of course. While surfing, when a report or essay strikes me as important to me, I often become immersed and read it as deeply as I read paper books. When I read a book that arrests me on my Kindle, I am lost to world. (Ask my wife.)
I experience many differences between the electronic reading experience and reading a paper book, but they are most similar, I should say identical, when I am most absorbed. Mr. Self writes about forgetting all “the workaday contingencies of their identity” while reading deeply. Among those contingencies is the media itself: desktop display, phone, dedicated reader, paperback, custom leather binding, they all are forgotten when deeply reading paper or an electronic display. Or at least I forget them, and I don’t think I am unique.
Publishing is certainly changing, but I very much doubt that reading itself is changing. Electronic reading is superficially different from paper reading and those superficial differences are challenging because they force readers to change habits they have developed since they were children: the way to hold a book and the how it feels in their hands, turning the pages, using a finger for a temporary bookmark, judging where they are by the thickness of pages already read. These are all parts of the reading experience that are not reproduced in electronic reading, but they have nothing to do with deep reading.
Until readers get beyond these and many other habits, they may have difficulty achieving deep reading electronically. As a software engineer, I have transitioned into electronic reading over at least two decades, so I am not a useful example, but I notice among my friends, the acclimation period is measured in weeks and months, not decades. Also, I observe that better readers, usually the ones who claim to be most attached to paper books, are the quickest studies at electronic reading after they start.
It’s fun to declare that the world is going to hell on a flat screen display and eInk, but I doubt that deep reading is on its way out.