Go virtual

I have been teaching online since 1999, but today I gave my first live virtual lecture. I don't quite believe that it's an adequate way of teaching, but as I always say about online teaching: it's a good alternative. In this particular case I was invited to do a lecture in Germany, and I just couldn't travel there for a whole number of reasons. Then my hosts asked whether I would be prepared to do a video lecture, and since I am always foolishly eager to try new things I agreed. It was some time ago, and I didn't contemplate how it would turn out. Last week we ran a trial, and after I had tried every single button it finally worked, so I was pretty confident it would work today. I had agreed to "meet" the technical assistant at a quarter to, and I started getting nervous, sitting there and staring at the dead screen. There is not much you can do. Then suddenly I saw a big lecture hall with a handful of students and wondered why there were so few - did they think it was a waste of time listening to someone who wasn't even there? (It turned out that they employ "academic quarter", that is, the lecture is announced at 4, but actually starts at 4.15. I was used to it when I taught in Finland).

I could see them, but not hear them, and they could neither see nor hear me, and I stared at myself on the screen and wondered whether I really look so hideous or was it just the camera. Eventually they could see and hear me, and I could hear them, but not see them, and by that time I just didn't dare push any more buttons in case I would ruin it all together. So I talked for an hour watching myself on the screen, without any contact with the audience, which felt a bit like talking into outer space. I like to see people's faces when I talk; I often adjust my talk according to the audience response - I guess we all do. But I just talked and talked, and sometimes I smiled, and sometimes I made a side comment which I'd normally expect the audience to react to. In fact, I wasn't even sure whether they were listening. But apparently they were, for they asked intelligent questions afterwards which they wouldnä'f have been able to ask if they hadn't heard me. It wasn't meant to be like that, but it worked for me, and I feel I can do it and would do it again.

Requests considered on first come first served basis.

Me and my paddy

I have finally succumbed and got an iPad. I will mostly use it for lectures, meetings and conferences: reading from screen rather than print out (a self-deceit of being green). I have been doing it for a long time noe with a laptop, but coming to a meeting with  laptop is almost like bringing a runic stone. Anyway, I am a happy owner of a paddy, and just as with my recent smartphone I am discovering things that I didn't know I wanted. I don't like calendar on the phone because it is too small and it takes me ages to type in a simple note, but I can imagine that next year will be the first since I was fifteen that I won't get a printed diary. I have a couple of months to discover whether paddy covers my needs.

One thing I did know I wanted was testing picturebook apps that one of my students has been studying for her thesis ever since the first iPad was launched. I remember her coming to supervision almost in tears saying: What shall I do? This changes everything. I can just as well throw away my thesis. To which the clever supervisor said: On the contrary, seize the day! Be the first to investigare picturebook apps in your thesis. Which she did.

The first picturebook app, that came free with the first iPad, was Dr Seuss' The Cat in the Hat. What my student and I agreed at once was that the app destroys the paratexts: cover, endpapers, title page - those element of the picturebook that sometimes are essential (if you want to know more, read my book How Picturebooks Work). What we tried to figure out was whether apps add something new or at least compensate fior what they have lost. The Cat in the Hat has been updated since then (one feature you can't do with a printed book, for better and for worse: you'll have to buy a new printed edition, while an app update writes over the previous version. No way you can compare covers). It is a good way to start a discussion of apps as compared with printed books. I put it on my syllabus before I got my paddy. But I will need more examples for this particular class.

I then bought Oliver Jeffers' The Heart and the Bottle, made by a celebrated picturebook author specifically as app. I suppose that you need to think slightly differently if you are doing an app from scratch, rather than transferring an existing picturebook into an app. If you are a clever picturebook creator you will think about how to make the most of the medium. I will need to play with it a bit more, but it is interesting, and it works. 

The third app I got was one of my favourite picturebooks, What Happened Then, by Tove Jansson. It's a wonderful book with cut-outs and lots of surprises. It is a interactive book, long before interactivity was associated with digital media. It is a sophisticated book. The app has lost it all and offers nothing instead. You tap and something pops up. Then it hides. You tap again, it pops up again. You shake, and leaves fall. Then they rise again. This app is a good argument for those against apps. It's merely a gimmick. Too bad. Too bad because parents will buy it for their kids who will never discover the real book. But that's what we have been saying about tevevision, movies and glossy Disney booklets of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame with a happy ending.

It's a book!

I am reading a book. OK, you say, so what else is new? You are not getting it, are you: I am reading a book. You don't scroll it down, You cannot blog with it. It cannot tweet. It cannot text. And so on. It's a book.

It's not like I am a totally digital person, but suddenly I find myself making ridiculous comparisons. The book is five hundred pages long, and even if it is a paperback, it's heavy and hard to hold. I have to break the spine to open it properly. The paper is yellowish and not friendly to my eyes. Worst of all: I cannot zoom to make the font larger. I find myself getting irritated because the book I am reading is not delivered through a medium I have got used to and find pleasurable.

I am not sure how to react to my own reaction. Does it mean that I will avoid printed books? To be frank, I am doing it already. If a book I want to read it not yet available in e-format, I wait. Am I missing something? The book I am reading is Swedish, therefore I could not get it on my tablet. But this is a matter of time. Will I ever buy another printed book? Well, there are still some kinds of books that work better in printed form, like picturebooks. But it's a matter of time.

Is the digital immigrant getting naturalised, and if so, what are the implications? The only consolation is that I am so old I'll be dead before it goes too far.

My further love affair with Kindle

I have now lived with a Kindle for six weeks. In my previous post, with the novelty of experience, I claimed that Kindle was just a book. I now know better.

It is certainly a neverending book, which was very practical while on travel. No problem with finishing a novel right in the middle of a transatlantic flight. Don't even have to open the overhead bin to take out another book of the huge portable library. Just browse through the e-library downloaded in the little thing and decide whether it's Mill on the Floss or Jude the Obscure next. I wonder how I've missed all these great books - me with my English degree. But I know I wouldn't have appreciated them so much when I was seventeen. Anyway, I would probably not have bought them all in printed versions and denied myself a great pleasure.

I have also discovered that Kindle is very convenient at the hairdresser's, instead of the silly glossy magazines. 

When I read the Kindle manual, I was quite skeptical about the numerous options: highlight, take notes, look up words in a dictionary. But it so happened that I am writing an essay about a book which I read last year, didn't like and gave away. I am writing about it because it felt very good for my purpose. I tried to figure out whom I gave my copy to, but after the first three close associates denied it, I gave up. I bought a new copy - for Kindle. While I was at it, I decided to try all those wonderful options. Highly recommended for academic purposes. Everything I used to do with pencil and Post-Its, scribbles in the margins, exclamations marks - I can do with the Kindle copy. I highlight a quotation, and I can write a memo note or a comment. Then I can go through them all quickly. I can copy and paste quotes directly into my own text. Unfortunately, Kindle doesn't have the correct pagination. I believe that it will be a recurrent issue in future academic publications.

Now that I know how clever my Kindle is, I may try some other functions. I may even finally learn to look up words in a dictionary.

Me and my Kindle

When I worked as a tour guide, rule number one was when the tourists asked how long it would take us to get where we were going, to add at least fifteen minutes to the estimated time and let it be a nice surspise when we are early. The other way round, you get grumpy tourists.

Amazon seems to follow the same principle. They give you an estimate delivery date with a wide margin, and you get happy when you get your order earlier. Since three days ago, I am a happy owner of a Kindle.

Being a professional reader, I cannot but reflect on the implications. I showed my new toy to a Russian friend with whom I was talking on Skype, and she commented, unimpressed, "Oh yes, I have one too". Apparently people do not make much fuss about their Kindles. However, I have resisted so long that I really need to contemplate the pros and cons.

It is vey small. Smaller than I thought it would be. It is smaller than a paperback book, and the screen is smaller yet. My first reaction was, I can't read that small text. But yes, I can. It is a pleasurable font size and background, and I don't feel any radical difference from reading a paper book. I don't mind having one page at a time, and I can get two pages if I want. It is very light and easy to hold, and after ten minutes I turn pages without thinking about it. After the initial settings, I don't use the keyboard because I find it too small and inconvenient to use. I have downloaded the first fifteen free classics that I wanted to re-read anyway, and they will keep me busy for a while. I downloaded them through my compuer, which I think is very good service. I feel much more comfortable with my computer with its large keyboard and mouse.

I have played a bit with the toy, reading the manual and testing what it can do. So far, I don't need anything that it can do. I don't want to clip my favourite passages and share them on Facebook. I may want at some point to clip quotes to paste them direct into my own writing, but I am not there yet. I don't need to read my Facebook or check my email on the run - I don't have a smartphone either.

So what is a Kindle for me? IT'S A BOOK!

Further reflections on e-books

Yesterday night I read some more Tess, this time on my little laptop, and it was just as easy and not as heavy. The cat was happy beside it. Apart from enjoying the book very much (I was too young to enjoy it when I read it first time), I tried to think what was actually different from reading a paper book. One thing, of course, is that you cannot physically see how much you have read and how much is still to read. Although Kindle told me, when I put in a bookmark, that I had read 15%. Putting in a bookmark is good, and unlike a physical bookmark, you cannot lose it. I have all kinds of fancy bookmarks, but I always end up using a receipt or a boarding pass.

What I definitely miss is the paratexts. As one of my students would expertly explain, paratexts is everything that is not part of the text. The cover, for instance. There is no cover on my Kindle Tess, and thus no cover image. I don't really mind it, but still worth noting. What I mind - or at least lack - is the back cover, with a publisher blurb. I tell my students to skip blurbs because they are stupid, but I always read blurbs carefully, perhaps exactly because they are stupid. Especially when you have read the book before and know how stupid the blurb is.

I also miss the pages where the author is presented.I miss the copyright page. I miss the table of contents - I always go back to it several times when I read a book. For Tess particularly, I miss the Introduction, timeline and notes they have in Penguin Classics. I usually read notes in advance because I don't wnat to be interrupted in my reading, but don't want to miss the comments. I guess there is another e-edition of Tess that has notes hyperlinked. Kindle has, without my consent, downloaded Oxford American (!) dictionary so that I can look up words I don't know. I haven't tried it yet, but it might prove useful. They say you ought to read books to learn.

I do not not miss the gentle rustle of pages, nor the feel of paper. Is there anything fundamentally wrong with me?

Final surrender

Let me get it right - I love books. Have always loved books, have always bought too many books, have several times got rid of huge numbers of my books for various reasons: moving countries is a good reason. Or running out of shelf space.Then I buy more books.

I have great respect for books. I don't write or highlight or underline in books (if I work with a book, I use post-its). In my youth, books were hard to get hold of. Books were valuable. I could occasionally pay a monthly salary for a very attractive book (were books expensive or was my salary miserable?).

On the other hand, I have no reverence for first or rare editions, and I like paperbacks, not only because they are cheaper, but because they are lighter and easier to read in bed or bring on a trip. And I have long ago discovered the practicality of Project Guthenberg when you are looking for a quote.

Yet I have so far not succumbed for reading devices.

I wonder whether having a Kindle is something literature people don't talk about, like a shameful disease. Because we all love books. Because books are so important, and all these horrible electronic things imply demise of the book. No literary scholar with self-respect will ever fall as low as reading e-books. Although for me it is most often the text that is important, not the physical object.

Anyway, yesterday as I started thinking about what books I want to take with me when I go to Sweden next week and then to Brazil the week after... and I remembered last time I was in Brazil and ran out of books and all those transatlantic flights when you finish a book in the middle of the trip and have no other choice than to start all over (you can do it with some books, but not all). And all the times you open a book you've brought on the plane and discover that you just don't want to read it right now, but you have to because there is nothing else to read except the inflight magazine.

I went on amazon and started looking, to begin with, whether any books I have on my current reading list were available as e-books, and of course they were, and since I am in the period of re-reading major classics, most of them are free. As I was clicking around I saw a link saying "Download Kindle for your PC". I thought I would try to see whether I sort of generally, in principle, hypothetically would be happy to read a novel on a screen. Because if it was awful there'd be no point in getting a Kindle.

I downloaded it, and I downloaded a book that had been on my reading list for a while, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I read Mayor of Castebridge a couple of months ago, and it was magnificent. A good, solid, crisp, smelly Penguin Classic. Could it be as good on screen? Yes, it was. It actually made no difference at all, except that when I had my laptop in bed, there was no room for the cat, so she was upset and left and never came back. But I read Tess of the d'Urbervilles for a couple of hours, and it made no difference whatsoever, and I played a bit with changing font size and opening two pages on screen, but it really didn't matter. Only my laptop is definitely heavier than a paperback, and it also gets very hot. I have a smaller laptop that I take with me on travel, and this morning I downloaded Kindle onto it and discovered, to my joy, that my Tess was there as well. And yet...

The estimated delivery of my Kindle is next Monday. I'll keep you posted.