There is an old saying that anxiety is the enemy of concentration.
One of the best pieces of sports journalism I ever read was by Gene Tunney, world heavyweight champion of the 1920s, writing about how reading books helped him stay calm and focused in the lead-up to his most famous fight against former champion Jack Dempsey. While members of Dempsey’s camp ridiculed Tunney for his bookishness, Tunney kept calm, and went on to win.
Most of us would feel stressed at the prospect of stepping into the boxing ring, but stress-related illnesses, especially depression and forms of anxiety and attention disorder, are becoming increasingly prevalent, especially in wealthy societies. According to a major 2006 projection of global mortality by Mathers and Loncar, by 2030, unipolar depression will be almost 40% more likely to cause death or disability than heart disease in wealthy societies.
Stress can of course have many causes, but in the most general sense, it spreads from factors that impact negatively on focus and concentration. We fear interruption or a surplus of tasks, responsibilities or options to choose, leading to heightened stress levels.
The digital age is an age of distraction; and distraction causes stress and weakens concentration. Concentration, as the philosopher William James argued in his classic 1890 work Principles of Psychology, is the most fundamental element of intellectual development. He wrote:
The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again, is the very root of judgement, character, and will … An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.
Concentration is equally important emotionally, as is being increasingly revealed by new research into “mindfulness” and meditation. The inability to focus is associated with depression and anxiety and, amongst other things, an underdeveloped sociability and human empathy. Tests have revealed that people report greater happiness from being effectively focused on what they are doing than from daydreaming on even pleasant topics.
How many memoirs include stories of the author surreptitiously reading books by torchlight underneath the blankets, with parents fearful of the child reading too much? (In my case I was reading The Hardy Boys so my mother’s objections were probably justified.)
As James Carroll has argued, at its core, reading is “the occasion of the encounter with the self”. In other words, the ultimate object of reading is not to take on information but to absorb and reflect upon it and, in the process, hopefully, form a more developed version of one’s own identity or being.
It seems likely that the concentration required and encouraged by books is extremely valuable. Reading books is good for you. And this seems especially so in the case of print books, where a reader is most completely free from distraction.
Ebooks, and more pertinently perhaps, the digital reading environment, are unquestionably transformative in the opportunities and experiences they offer to readers. Great oceans of knowledge otherwise only obtainable through tracking down print books or physical archives and records, have become available and, much more easily searchable. Hyperlinks mean readers no longer have to read in a straight line, as it were, but can follow innumerable paths of interest.
Web2 technologies enable “talking back” to publishers and media, the formation of groups of readers with common interests, easy (sometimes too easy) sharing of files and other information. Stories can be enriched by animated graphics and interactivity. And so on.
No-one in their right mind would imagine that the e-reading environment can or should somehow be wound back.
Nonetheless, by their nature e-reading devices facilitate and encourage the constant, inevitably distracting consideration of other reading options, more or less instantly attainable. This is probably their main selling point. Maryanne Wolf has even asked:
“if the assumption that ‘more’ and ‘faster’ are necessarily better (will) have consequences that radically affect the quality of attention that can transform a word into a thought and a thought into a world of unimagined possibility?”
It is interesting to consider, in light of this possibility that the greatest benefit of reading may come from its capacity to assist in the development of focus and concentration, that the print book may not actually have been superseded or, indeed, be supersede-able.
This, I think, is what the novelist, critic, philosopher and communications historian Umberto Eco means when he argues: “The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.”
Sean Manning
Physicist
On behalf of readers I thank you for this article.
Also, Eco is a genius.
Geoffrey Edwards
logged in via email @gmail.com
I happy to live in the age of the Web.
It has provided me many more means to buy books!
The web is great tool for rapid discovery, but if I truly want to come to grips with something I go for ink and paper.
Grant Phillips
project officer
The argument for reading from a printed book simply appears to be the ambiance gained from handling it.
The nostalgic and intimate interaction that you get from the physical printed medium rather than the actual content.
I think a shallow and continual focus on the physical medium which the words are contained in demeans the beauty of those words rather than enhancing them.
Nathan Hollier
Director, Monash University Publishing at Monash University
Well what I'm suggesting I suppose is that the ambiance gained from reading a printed book might actually be important in terms of strengthening concentration. I hope I'm not raising this as a possibility on the basis of nostalgia, any more than those 'defending' e reading (which I was certainly not attacking) are doing so on the basis of some irrational (if not of the kind famously identified by Reich) desire to attach themselves to powerful new social phenomena.
Comment removed by moderator.
Tim Scanlon
Debunker
Actually, I'd argue that reading a book is reading a book, regardless of the medium it is presented in.
To argue that e-reading a book is somehow inferior is a falsehood, or perhaps myth, that comes out of a reluctance to adopt technology or change. An e-ink screen is just as good as the printed page, with added lights they are often easier to read, and if you look at a 900 page fantasy novel the e-reader is much easier to read from. But that isn't all, e-book surveys have shown that e-reading devices promote more reading (as measured in book sales).
I haven't seen any figures on reading from tablets, so that may run contrary to the e-reader statistics, but it seems clear that e-reading is probably better for readers than a paper book. So a paper book is not necessarily a better way for extending attention spans (etc), but rather, reading a book, regardless of medium, is the important part.
alfred venison
records manager (public sector)
in germany e-books are 5% of total sales (frankfurt bookfair 2012). in france 3%. in italy 2%. is this an anglophone phenomenon? are there just more e-books in english?
sources i've found say e-book take up is less per capita in canada than in the usa. books are subject to gst in canada, except in quebec, which takes culture production/consumption seriously as a means to support the (canadian) french language & culture in an anglophone sea, and where the gov't zero rates books, at a cost to itself of $55 million a year. e-books strangely though are hit by gst in quebec, except e-books that link to a website (?). groups calling for this anomaly to be reviewed fear the gov't will just slap gst on all books rather than take it off e-books. can't find info on what proportion of book sales are e-books in canada & quebec. -a.v.
Tim Scanlon
Debunker
Alfred, the markets are at all different stages. Amazon has only really been on the block in Europe in the past 18 months. In the UK the figures are more similar to the US market, which has been around almost as long. Australia is an oddity because we pay ridiculous prices for ebooks, unless we buy from US stores, so the uptake is hard to measure with sales. Canada is the home of Kobo, so they have a decent takeup but they also have a lot of market restrictions on content that haven't been bridged…
Read morealfred venison
records manager (public sector)
to be sure the usa is the main market for e-books in english. in france, germany & italy they have backlogs of national literature in their own languages & well established publishers, they don't need to wait on translations of english language literature to get going. -a.v
Tim Scanlon
Debunker
I also should add, I've heard discussions that suggest the French are supporting their local literature industry and are partly opposed to ebooks at this stage. I don't know if this is wholly true or still the case, but that would also change the dynamics of adoption.
alfred venison
records manager (public sector)
i have not read that france is any more deliberately opposed to e-books than quebec; i think the problem in both jurisdictions is systemic & is the result of well-intentioned legislation that has become anachronistic as circumstances have changed. like quebec, france views book culture - from the publisher, to retailer, to reader - as having an important role in securing national culture from encroachment by multinational (anglophone) interests. to anglophone observers this is protectionism, but…
Read moreJohn Newton
Author Journalist
Once again, I offer The Gutenberg elegies by Sven Birkerts who, in 1994, first saw the possible problems of reading digitally. He used the expression 'immersion in the text' to describe the process of reading on a still, fixed and uninterrupted paper page.
I understand him. I understand the problems of reading on an electronic device. I completed an editing course and our lecturer told us that all editors, of any age (the usual criticism of anti-electronic page people is that they're old farts) will edit a long manuscript on the screen.
And if I want to re-read Birkerts in 5, 10 years - I can go to my bookshelf. What system will be used to run your electronic reading device in 5,10 years, when three year old computers are out of date?
Having said that there is a place for the electronic reader. For travellers, for reading disposable books, for text books, But there will, as Hollier says, always be books.
Tim Scanlon
Debunker
So you're saying that paper won't degrade with time yet no-one will think to transfer books to the new mediums?
The opposite is true. Project Gutenburg is just one example of archiving and updating electronic formats for books that are out of press or out of copyright. An e-book shelf is not restricted by print runs and shelving space, it is only restricted by the owners of the content and subsequent interest in that content, updating it to the new medium.
I know of several authors who have out of print backlists that have reverted to them. They are now able to sell those titles and have more people own and read them. Before the e-book, that book only existed for the few that had already bought it, now that book exists for anyone who buys it.
alfred venison
records manager (public sector)
i got a nexus at xmas to replace my palm pilot that failed a couple of years ago. i loved that palm pilot. but, as with the palm, reading books with footnotes or endnotes - i.e. any good history book - is a pain. footnotes because they disappear off the page when i magnify the print size. endnotes because they're up to 500 pages away from where i'm reading & using the hyperlinks doesn't always get me back to where i started from. bad e-book production? maybe. but when i got a second browser…
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John Weldon
Lecturer, School of Communication and the Arts at Victoria University
Hi Nathan,
I think you've successfully avoided the nostalgia issue. What you've touched on is something explored by Jonathan Westin in a great article in Convergence in 2012. He contends (very briefly) that we are failing to recognise the cultural importance of form, when it comes to reading. This he maintains, has a marked effect on how we read.
No one is suggesting that e-reading is a lesser experience, but it is surely a different experience than reading printed text. That ambience you mention may be more integral to the reading experience than we have thought so far.