I was in Tofino last weekend with some friends (surfing, but that’s another story). There were four of us, lounging around by the fire, reading. Two of us had Kindles, the other two were reading print books.
Reading from an eBook reader has, for me, proved to be a very pleasurable and seamless experience – the device really does disappear in the same way that a physical book disappears – I am immersed in the words. It is quite different than reading from a laptop – I’m always aware of the machine when I’m doing that.
However, it did occur to me that there was something very different about the experience of reading in company. First of all, the rustle of the turning page is replaced by the subtle click. But what I really noticed was that I could see what two of my companions were reading, but not the other; and they could not see what I was reading. (Insert predictable porn joke here.) This loss of social information is quite interesting – we have grown accustomed to the cover of the book conveying data about the reader. With eBook readers, all this is gone.
