The Power of the 'Off' Button

Evidently, the majority of last week’s IST 511 blogs consisted of discussions about the always controversial eBooks. I chose not to discuss eBooks last week, because I felt as though I had made my views of eBooks clear in my first blog post several weeks ago. (To paraphrase, I basically admitted that although I don’t particularly enjoy eReaders, they are here to stay and it is better to embrace them than complain about them). However, as the discussion in our class yet again centered on the issue, I feel as though I have to pick up on the topic once more and hopefully for the last time.

Rather than simply debating over whether or not eBooks are good or bad or whether libraries should embrace them or reject them, I prefer to talk about the idea that Professor Lankes hinted at in his presentation at the Virtual Summit on eBooks and further discussed with us in class last week. In the Virtual Summit, Professor Lankes talked about the concept of reading as a social act, and not a completely private act of conceptual decoding. He further suggested that eBooks should reflect this social aspect of reading by becoming more like the popular social networking tools we all seem to be obsessed with, like Facebook and Twitter. The example that we discussed in class went something like this: While reading Austen’s Pride and Prejudice on your eBook, occasionally other things pop up on your screen, like Amazon’s “Other people who like Pride and Prejudice also like Sense and Sensibility” or, while reading Pride and Prejudice on your eBook, the same eReading machine allows you to tweet to your friends, “Hilarious! I just read the part where Mr. Collins fumblingly proposes to Elizabeth!”

There were all sorts of arguments in class against this sort of thing, i.e., “I don’t want things to pop up at me while I’m reading. It would be so distracting!” I agree that social networking on my eReader would in fact be quite distracting. Unfortunately, I am not one of those people who can multitask and do many other things while reading. If I am not in a completely silent atmosphere, I literally cannot focus on the text in front of me (as a side note, I actually think I might have a type of learning disability, but I’ve never been officially diagnosed with anything). I can’t even enjoy reading a book at a coffee shop, so being bombarded by tweets and Facebook updates while reading would be a terrible thing for someone like me. I would never be able to read anything in its entirety again! If you believe in Schwartz’s theory of the Paradox of Choice, it would also follow that my not-ever-reading-anything-all-the-way-through would also lead to a personal dissatisfaction and would have a negative effect on my psyche.

Despite the effects it will have on my psyche, I do think that social networking applications are quite possibly the future of eBooks and that I’m going to have to deal with it when it comes along. However, if such applications are indeed the future, doesn’t it also make sense that this hypothetical eReader will also have a button or switch to turn off all those distractions, too? I know that there are other people in the world that are easily distracted like me, so it seems as though the inclusion of the ‘off’ button will be just as likely as those other developments. Basically, my message to everyone is: trust in the power of the ‘off’ button and you can deal with any of these new trends that come along.

Here's a link to Schwartz's TED talk on the Paradox of Choice: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html