Reply To: What are you reading?
The friend who gave me the Eco book said the same thing about spatial memory and e-books (and was able to quickly locate a particular passage in the dead tree book she gave me.) She finds this skill particularly important, as she’s a traveller (she’s been travelling for 11 months on her current trip) and when she’s staying at someone’s place she has a habit of reading one of their books quickly (to be sure to finish it before leaving) and then going back and reading specific passages more slowly if she has time.
I guess I don’t read books enough these days to miss that; the only thing that bothered me (in the Kindle reader for iPad, the first thing I read an e-book in since the Newton MessagePad) was not being able to skip forward to find how much further I had to go in a chapter without losing my place. So I quite like that the iBooks reader on iPad tells me how many pages I have till the next chapter. Also, I like that it’s easy to search for the bits you want to go back to if you remember the keywords. Maybe I have a better keyword memory than spatial memory. All in all, for me the lack of comforting treecorpse is made up for by the fact that with just this one thin device in my bag I have no danger of running out of things to read (though in theory I could run out of battery), plus I have a few dozen dictionaries, which are my favourite books.
Of course, some books can’t be automatically paginated to the author’s satisfaction, so naturally I’ll get Hofstadter’s book on paper.